The Story of Stories

Why is my friend late? How does nuclear fission work? What can I do to help my baby sleep through the night? We all feel the need to understand why certain things happen. Some researchers think the drive to explain the world is a basic human impulse, similar to thirst or hunger. This week on Hidden Brain, psychologist Tania Lombrozo discusses how explanations can lead to discovery, delight, and disaster. Then, Jonathan Rottenberg answers your questions about rethinking depression on Your Questions Answered.

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

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 2,000 years ago, in ancient Greece, a local ruler had a problem.

• 0:10Shankar Vedantam?

  He suspected his new crown wasn't made of solid gold, but he couldn't prove it.

• 0:17Shankar Vedantam?

  So he asked the kingdom's most famous mathematician, Archimedes, to investigate.

• 0:23Shankar Vedantam?

  While pondering the puzzle, Archimedes took a bath.

• 0:28Shankar Vedantam?

  He filled the tub to the brim, and as he stepped in, the water overflowed.

• 0:36Shankar Vedantam?

  Archimedes had a flash of insight. The water that spilled out of the bath reflected the volume of his own body. He realized that if he put the crown into water, he could measure its volume by seeing how much water was displaced. He could use this to tell the difference between a crown made of pure gold and one that had impurities.

• 1:01Shankar Vedantam?

  He was so excited with his discovery that he leaped out of the tub and ran naked through the streets, shouting, "Eureka, eureka",

• 1:10Shankar Vedantam?

  which is Greek for "I found it, I found it."

• 1:16Shankar Vedantam?

  The famous story of the eureka moment may or may not have happened. It was written 200 years after Archimedes died. But it says something profound about our minds. A good explanation gives us pleasure. And when we cannot come up with a good explanation, we feel dissatisfied. Something in the human mind yearns to make sense of the world.

• 1:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Some researchers think this sense-making drive is a basic human impulse, no different than thirst or hunger.

• 1:53Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, why our minds seek to explain the world and how the stories we tell ourselves can lead to discovery, delight, and disaster.

• 2:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Farmers Insurance. At Farmers, they believe insurance should be in terms you can understand. Like with coverage on a page, you get a clear view of what is and isn't covered in your policy in plain, simple language, so you're not left with any surprises. Does your insurance do that? Check them out at farmers.com, underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affilia. Products not available in every state.

• 2:49Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit MazdaUSA.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.

• 3:21Speaker 01

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• 3:30Speaker 01

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• 3:38Speaker 01

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• 3:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Why is my friend late? How does nuclear fission work? What exactly is happening when I sneeze? Human beings have an endless number of questions. At Princeton University, psychologist Tania Lombrozo is interested in why we come up with all these questions and how our drive to make sense of the world reveals something fundamental about our minds. Tania Lombrozo, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Tania, I want to start with a personal mystery you once encountered in your own life. Your toddler returned home from preschool one day wearing different pants than the ones she wore in the morning. Tell me how the rest of this mystery unfolded.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  So that observation in itself wasn't so surprising. Toddlers have accidents of all kinds, all the time. And so it was pretty familiar that you might have different pants because your potty-training child might have had an accident. But at this point, my toddler had been very well potty-trained for months and hadn't had an accident. And so on Monday, this was a little surprising. But it was even more surprising when we went back to pick her up on Tuesday and found, again, that she had different pants on and had another accident. And then on Wednesday, and then on Thursday. So I found the teacher and said, "What's going on? She was perfectly potty-trained. What happened?" And the teacher explained that on Monday, she'd made an interesting observation, that the girls peed sitting down, but the boys peed standing up.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And she thought to herself, "I want to learn how to do that, too." And so all week, she had been practicing peeing standing up.

• 5:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, this is a really charming story, but I want to draw your attention to Tania's thought process as the week unfolded. On Monday, when her child came home wearing different pants, she came up with one explanation. Her daughter had had an accident. But when the same thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, Tania came up with a different explanation. Maybe her daughter was regressing on her potty training. Finally, when the teacher explained what was going on, Tania now had one simple story that unified and explained everything. As a researcher, Tania is fascinated by how our minds yearn for such stories and explanations and what happens when we can't find them.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  And one very mundane example that I can think of is the experience I had when I was trying to find parking as a professor at Berkeley, where I taught for many years. And people who live in the area know that parking can be a challenge. And so I would develop all of these pet theories that maybe if it was noon on a Tuesday, then this particular parking lot was probably a good place to park, because at noon, I bet the law school professors go out to lunch. But the engineers, they probably don't go out to lunch. So I shouldn't try the lot by engineering. And so I would develop these pet theories to try to figure out what was going on. And perhaps a given pet theory would work for a week or two, but then by week three, it no longer worked. And I had to say, "Maybe there's not much patterns here. Maybe I'm picking up on noise."

• 6:58Shankar Vedantam?

  You cite the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould, who once said that humans were primates who tell stories. What's the connection between the world of stories and the world of explanations?

• 7:10Speaker 02

  I think both stories and explanations are ways that we really try to make sense of or understand the world around us. The way I think about them is they're sort of two ends of a continuum. You know, a good story is one that's full of detail and creates visual images and emotions. A good explanation tends to be a bit more abstract. It might appeal to general features of the world. For thinking about science, it might appeal to scientific laws or regularities. And I think if you look at everyday cases of explanation, we do a mix of storytelling and appealing to these more general features of the world. So for example, if you see a friend arrive late to work and you say, "Why were you late to work?"

• 7:53Speaker 02

  The friend might appeal to some general ideas, like there was traffic. But she might also tell you how she woke up five minutes later than she intended to, and then she was rushed, and then she burned her toast. All of these very concrete details that really help you understand, from her perspective, what her morning was like and why she's in the emotional state that she's in, and so on. So I think often, we do both of these. We do the storytelling, which is very concrete and particular. And we do the explaining, which is much more about extracting the structure of the world in a way that's generalizable.

• 8:28Shankar Vedantam?

  And when you say extracting the structure of the world in a way that's generalizable, what I'm getting from you is that explanations, and to some extent, stories as well, are about constructing models for the world. They allow us to cut through confusion, to distill complexity into simplicity.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yes, I think part of what explanations do is that they relate our observations, which are highly variable, changing from moment to moment, to something more like a simple, underlying structure that allows us to predict how things might go in the future. It's a way to try to extract order and regularity from what might otherwise seem disorganized and unsettling.

• 9:11Shankar Vedantam?

  The more Tanya thought about it, the more she realized that our capacity for explanations needed to be studied carefully. Our drive for explanation itself needed explanation.

• 9:26Shankar Vedantam?

  For instance, there are times when this drive can make us curious, help us discover new things. But there are other times when our hunger for a simple story can make us leap to conclusions and become less curious.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  So an everyday example of this that might be familiar to people is the experience of interviewing someone for a position. When we interview people, often, I think, even without realizing it, we construct a whole story about the kind of person this is and how they're going to do in the job and how they fit into what we're looking for. And that's one kind of evidence that we might use for deciding who to hire. But then we also have things like their resume and their letters of reference. And perhaps we tend to over-rely on our own story that we construct and under-rely on these other sources of evidence that may or may not fit into our story so nicely.

• 10:20Shankar Vedantam?

  So this is not just saying that explanations are sort of deductions we draw from the world. It's really saying that explanations are the way we actually see the world. We actually see the world through the explanations and models we build of the world.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  One way to think about it is that explanations are the currency in which we understand things. We're presented with all sorts of information, but we need to do something with it. And the way we do something with it is to construct some sort of a model, an explanatory model, one that we find explanatory satisfying. And that's what we use as a basis for thinking and reasoning.

• 10:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Well, we'll talk soon about the experiments that you've conducted to analyze our capacity for explanation. But I want to start with a story that illustrates so much about our drive for explanation. You once drew a link between your daughter's personality and what you knew about her before she was born. Can you explain, Tanya?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Sure. So when I was pregnant with my first daughter, I discovered around seven months into the pregnancy that she was breech. For those of you who haven't gone through this process and aren't familiar with it, that just basically means her head was up rather than down. And that's not where you want it to be before birth. And so, being a good scientist, I did all sorts of research on how she might be able to turn around, the probability that she would turn around before birth and so on. But in fact, she was very comfortable in just the position she was and did not turn around prior to birth.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  This daughter's now 10, and we still joke that this illustrates her wonderful persistence and stubbornness. She's very steadfast in the best way that I think will make her an amazing adult and sometimes frustrating child.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  You know, of course, on some level, I don't really think there is a connection between her having been in a breech position before she was born and her being a persistent stubborn child later. But it's so tempting to draw these connections and to see these patterns and to try to make sense of what we observe now in terms of what we know about the past.

• 12:24Shankar Vedantam?

  And what I love about this is it shows how indiscriminate we are in coming up with explanations for things that otherwise feel inexplicable.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  I think that's right. I think very often, the world presents us with ambiguity. And what we do is we try to connect the dots in a way that tells a compelling narrative and that allows us to have a sense that there is order.

• 12:50Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, we look at the great benefits and the great dangers that are contained in our drive to explain the world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 13:09Speaker 03

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• 13:54Speaker 03

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• 14:11Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you were a kid, you've probably asked a very important question all the time.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Why? Why are there clouds? Why does water boil? Why do I sneeze?

• 14:25Shankar Vedantam?

  If you're a grown-up, you might still ask why, even though the questions might be different. Why is my colleague late? Why does my dog seem sad? Why is my neighbor more successful than I am? At Princeton University, psychologist Tania Lombrozo studies our powerful drive to understand what is happening, to explain the world, and what our search for explanations can reveal about us. Tanya, your father was trained as an electrical engineer, and during business trips to Japan, he would sometimes bring back mysterious little electronic gifts for you to play with. Tell me what you did with them and the connection that you have made between that childhood experience and your research today as a scientist.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Well, my father had a rule when he came back with these mysterious gifts, which was that if my brother and I could figure out how they worked, we could keep them. And this was a challenge because everything was in Japanese, and often, they were very unfamiliar. I remember one time he brought back something which we eventually discovered was an alarm clock. But it had a series of numbers arrayed on one side and numbers on the other side, and lots of little switches for each of the numbers. And so with the right combination of numbers, you could sort of specify what time you wanted it to sound. And so what we had to do was basically look at the features of these artifacts, try to figure out what different buttons they did, think about why someone might have designed it in that particular way, right?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  What might it be for, given that it was designed in this particular way? And that sort of process of reverse engineering, of looking at something's behavior, what it looks like, how it behaves, and then trying to think backwards to what its function must be, such that you can understand why it has those properties. That's very much what a psychologist does, looking at human behavior and then trying to figure out why the mind works the way it does.

• 16:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Tanya doesn't just do this with other people's minds. She does it with her own. For example, she once woke up in the middle of the night because she heard some mysterious sounds. Of course, she did what any of us would do in that situation. She looked for an explanation.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  So this was when my daughter was probably around three, and my mother was visiting. And when I heard noise, I went outside of my bedroom door and I found my mother and my daughter sitting in the dark, having a full-blown tea party with stuffed animals around the table and pretend cake and so on. So I was very puzzled. I also know that my mother would prefer to be sleeping at 3:00 a.m. So how had this happened? This seemed to something that called out for explanation.

• 17:15Shankar Vedantam?

  And what did you find out? What was behind it?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  What I discovered was that my daughter had woken up and was very enthusiastic that her grandmother was visiting. So went straight downstairs to wake up my mother. And when my mother was woken up, she didn't think it was strange that it was dark because my daughter often woke up before the sun came up. So she just thought it was morning.

• 17:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, you could just say at this point, this is unacceptable. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. Go back to bed. Send them both back to bed and go back to sleep. But in some ways, that was inadequate for you. You actually wanted to know why they were there. It was important for you to find out. Explaining what happened is actually really important to knowing what the correct response is to the thing that you're seeing.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think it's also very important to being able to anticipate when it will happen again, to being able to bring it about more or to prevent it, depending on whether it's an outcome that we want or prefer to avoid. So I think that there's a lot we get out of an explanation for an event, especially when it involves people and concerns about responsibility and blame. And knowing exactly why someone acted the way they did is incredibly important.

• 18:27Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked earlier about the value that explanations provide us in terms of producing a world that is more predictable. Can you talk about this idea a little more? I'm thinking about the world of sports.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Good combination of attacking and defending from the both guys.

• 18:43Shankar Vedantam?

  That, you know, if you understand the strategy an opponent is using, not just sort of responding to whatever your opponent is doing in the moment, but understand the strategy behind your opponent's actions, it becomes much easier to compete and much easier to win.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  That's a great example. I will confess, I do not understand the world of sports. So I will take your word for it, but that makes sense. But I think it's generally the case. I mean, if you think about trying to anticipate somebody's behavior, perhaps you have an arch-nemesis and you're trying to anticipate their next move. If you understand what's motivating them, why are they acting the way they are? What's their goal? If you have answers to those questions, you'll be in a much better position to anticipate what they're going to do and potentially to prevent it.

• 19:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Well, that was extraordinary. One, I didn't think he was going to get there. And as I was reading your work, I was realizing that, you know, we don't just benefit from the explanations that we discover. We benefit from the explanations of many human beings who came before us. I mean, you might, you might even argue that culture is a mechanism to transmit explanations from one generation to the next.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think typically, when we think about learning from explanations, what we have in mind is learning from the explanations that we receive from other people or from books. I think it's perhaps less recognized, but equally important, that we also learn by trying to get explanations ourselves.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Sometimes that motivates us to get evidence and make new observations. But sometimes we can learn something new just by trying to explain to ourselves. There's a phenomenon called the self-explanation effect that I think most people have probably experienced. And that's the experience of coming to understand something better as a result of trying to explain it to yourself or to somebody else. Part of what's sort of mysterious and amazing about the phenomenon is that that's a kind of learning that occurs even though you're not getting new information from anybody else or from the external world. You're just rearranging and scrutinizing what's already in your head. And in the course of doing that, you can sometimes have one of these aha moments and come to realize that you understand something better.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Or sometimes come to realize that you thought you understood something, but that there's actually an important gap in your knowledge that you need to fill.

• 21:02Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the reasons for this is something called the illusion of explanatory depth. And you hinted at this just a second ago. Can you, can you unpack what that idea is, Tanya?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Many of us feel like we understand how a lot of the devices in our everyday life work. We understand how a bicycle works. We understand how a microwave works, how a zipper works, and so on. If you ask people, they'll typically say, yeah, I understand how a zipper works. And then you say, OK, can you please explain it? And what happens when people actually try to explain something like how a zipper works is they start to appreciate all of the ways in which maybe they really don't have the full story of how a zipper works. And the process of trying to generate a good explanation helps us appreciate that we're really falling short.

• 21:54Shankar Vedantam?

  I've seen experiments where you ask people to draw a bicycle, for example, and people will draw a chain that connects the two wheels of the bicycle together, which, of course, would make the bicycle impossible to, to actually ride. And you realize very quickly that even when it comes to extremely basic things, we might actually not understand very well how they work. But it actually requires us to be put on the spot to be able to reveal this, this gap in our knowledge.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  That's right. Psychologists sometimes talk about what's called metacognition, which is sort of our cognition about our own cognition. And this is the case where our metacognition is often wrong. We often think we know something that we actually don't know. And in the process of trying to explain it, we can get better calibrated and appreciate what we do and we don't know. I think that's one of the reasons trying to explain can be really powerful. But I think in other cases, it can also actually help you not just recognize gaps, but even fill them.

• 22:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Tanya cites a scene from the PBS TV series Beecham House. It's set in India in the late 18th century.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  An Englishman has been accused of having stolen from the emperor, and he's put in a jail cell. And so he's in his jail cell, trying to explain to himself how this happened. And he's thinking to himself, you know, who could have betrayed me? Why would they have betrayed me? How could the emperor have known where the stolen property was in my house and so on? And from that jail cell, he doesn't get any new information. He doesn't have any new piece of evidence. And yet, just thinking it through and thinking about all of the pieces of evidence he already had allows him to have the aha moment where he realizes who has betrayed him.

• 23:37Shankar Vedantam?

  With this new insight, the Englishman confronts the true perpetrator of the crime.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  You know there are innumerable candidates.

• 23:45Speaker 06

  I have arrived at one simple question. Who had the most to gain?

• 23:52Speaker 06

  I realize now, you did not meet my mother by chance at the docks in Calcutta.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  You were there by design.

• 24:02Speaker 06

  You knew exactly where she was going and when she would leave.

• 24:07Speaker 06

  You'd probably be monitoring her for months.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  So sometimes we learn by getting new evidence or by asking other people. But sometimes we learn just by thinking about things in the right way. It's a process I refer to as learning by thinking. In this case, learning by trying to explain to yourself.

• 24:24Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, some time ago on Hidden Brain, we spoke with the researcher Vera Tobin. She studies the techniques that storytellers use to take advantage of our cognitive systems. And she said something that is very close to what you just told me a second ago. I want to play you a short clip of what she said.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  What a story can do for you is construct this insight experience where you feel not that something has blindsided you or that you were just taken by surprise, but this experience that feels as if you have a real aha moment about how things fit together. And that is something that humans like a lot.

• 24:59Shankar Vedantam?

  So the two things that jump out at me when I, when I hear Vera say that, Tanya, is that storytellers are doing two things. One, they're actually constructing a story that has mystery and confusion and uncertainty built into it. And because we find those things aversive, it actually serves as a hook that keeps us listening, keeps us watching, keeps us reading. And then when the explanation is provided, it provides us with this burst of pleasure because we suddenly understand that the mystery is resolved, the puzzle is solved.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Yes, I love that example. And I would also add that science can often have that character as well. You know, so in the case of a good story, there's an author crafting the story to have just the right form. But I think part of what makes science very satisfying is that some of the time we get that experience as well of having all of these clues and then getting the satisfying theory that makes all of those clues fit together in a way that makes sense.

• 25:56Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to talk a moment about situations where explanations do not feel pleasurable. We've all had the experience of watching a magic trick and being amazed and then discovering the explanation behind the trick. And invariably, this does not produce wonder, but it produces disappointment, something that in fact, appeared wondrous, turns out to be, you know, pedestrian. What do you think this reveals about the explanatory system in the brain?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  One thing that I think it tells us is that there might be cases where we actually find uncertainty and mystery and awe somewhat pleasurable. I think if you think about an emotion like awe, it has possibly a kind of negative tinge, right? It can be kind of scary to have uncertainty and not understand something. But there's also a way in which it can be pleasurable. It tells us, there's something to learn here. Here's something that's worth paying attention to. So when we have something that seems to defy the laws of physics or the laws of probability, and it turns out it was just something completely mundane, I think there's a violation between

• 27:03Speaker 02

  our sense that there was something really amazing to be learned or discovered and then the reality that actually it was just business as usual.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  So one thing that we find is that people are more curious about the answers to questions about science than about religion. They think that we should answer science questions more than we should answer questions about religion. If I ask you, why is rust red? And I say, it's a mystery. That just seems wrong. But if I say, why does God exist? It's a mystery. Why did Jesus walk on water? It's a mystery. For a lot of questions about religion, it's not just that we don't know, it's that we seem to be much more comfortable with the idea that we can't know and perhaps that we shouldn't know.

• 27:55Shankar Vedantam?

  And what do you think spells the difference? Why is it that for some things, we actually think that it's unacceptable that you tell me that there's no answer to this? And for other things, I feel like it's unacceptable that you tell me that there is an answer to it?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  I think there's a few factors in play. I think one of them is that our beliefs play all sorts of different kinds of roles for us. One reason that we have the beliefs that we do and that we aspire to have particular kinds of beliefs is because we want to be accurate and represent the world in a way that will give us a model that allows us to predict what will happen. But our beliefs also play important social roles. They play important moral roles. They play important personal roles. And I think sometimes in a case like religion or relationships to particular people or institutions, demanding an explanation might compete with other kinds of goals related to relationships and trust. We also have evidence that there are some cases where people are uncomfortable with the idea that science could fully explain the human mind.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  So for example, people seem to in general be very comfortable thinking that science could explain why we forget things or how stereo vision works or how motor control works. But they're much less comfortable with the idea that science could explain our religious beliefs or our moral behavior or spiritual experience or appreciation for art. So all of these phenomena are phenomena that we have a, a rich internal experience that we feel like we have special access to as the person who's experiencing them. And for those phenomena, it also seems like people think there might be a sort of threat to the idea that somebody outside of our own mind, who isn't having those rich personal experiences, could provide a full explanation.

• 29:39Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering, tell me what you think of this hypothesis, that part of what we're doing when we're trying to explain things is we're trying to make the outside world comprehensible to the inside world. But there are things in the inside world that already feel comprehensible to us. And for those things, an explanation from the outside does not feel welcome, but it actually feels like an intrusion.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  I think that's a really interesting idea. As a psychologist, of course, I want to resist that because my job is precisely explaining the, the internal world. But I think, I think what you describe is capturing something of many people's experience. Sometimes people talk about the idea that we are intuitive dualists like Descartes. We think of the mind as somehow fundamentally separate from the body. And so part of what's going on in some of these cases, I think, is that by trying to give it an external or scientific explanation to our internal experience, we are crossing those levels in an uncomfortable way. We're trying to explain aspects of the mental by appeal to aspects of the biological or the physical.

• 30:45Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how our drive for explanations can sometimes lead to disaster. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 31:36Speaker 07

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• 32:09Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Human beings seem to possess an innate drive to come up with explanations for things. This drive makes us curious, helps us discover things. But as much as our capacity for explanation is impressive and useful, psychologist Tania Lombrozo has also found there are important ways in which this drive can lead us astray.

• 32:33Shankar Vedantam?

  Tania, some years ago, researchers from the University of Wisconsin had kids listen to a children's story. It was from the series Clifford, the Big Red Dog. One day Clifford and his friends discovered a new dog who wants to play with them, but this dog is different from them in an important way. I want to play you a short clip from the television version of the story. What a nice guy. He's only got three legs, Clifford. Oh, my gosh.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  What should we do, Clifford? He wants to play with us.

• 33:02Shankar Vedantam?

  So, let's play.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 33:06Shankar Vedantam?

  We just have to remember. So, Tania, what did the research study ask and what did it find?

• 33:11Speaker 02

  In this study, people were interested in children's ability to extract the moral or the lesson of a story. And as you can probably imagine, in this case with Clifford and the three-legged dog, part of what the story was going for was a general lesson about accepting others who might be different from ourselves, about inclusion and so on. But in fact, overwhelmingly, when children were asked about the lesson, they drew a blank or they drew a much, much more specific lesson or moral, like you should be nice to three-legged dogs.

• 33:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Which is not a completely unreasonable conclusion to draw.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. I think it makes enormous sense. But of course, if that's the lesson you draw from it, you might wonder about the value of reading Aesop's fables and other lessons to our children, right? If all they're learning about is how you should act towards tortoises and hares, a lot of what we want is for them to extract some more general lesson.

• 34:06Shankar Vedantam?

  To put this another way, you can have different levels of explanations. Sometimes your explanation might be correct in a literal sense, but you miss the larger meaning. Other times, we may focus too much on the big picture. Think about what happens when the fire alarm goes off in your office. Instead of drawing the simple explanation that something is wrong and you should evacuate the building, you might sit around and wait for a bigger explanation. Is this a real emergency, a drill?

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I think we often face a trade-off between gathering all of the information and learning as much as possible versus acting in a way that's efficient. And we have to decide when we're going to decide that we have enough information and just act. In the case that you just described, there are a couple of different types of errors that you could make, and those errors have very different kinds of costs, right? So one kind of error that you could make is failing to learn something that might have been valuable, like whether or not the fire alarm was caused by microwave popcorn being left too long or by something else. But another kind of error that you might make is spending too much time trying to figure out what happened and not leaving the building, and that is a very costly error. So in that kind of case, it seems like you'd probably be making a mistake

• 35:24Speaker 02

  to err on the side of trying to learn extra rather than act safely or cautiously. But there's going to be other cases where the cost of failing to learn is the cost that you might want to try to avoid.

• 35:39Shankar Vedantam?

  You've also found in other studies that people dislike explanations that are generally very good, but that have certain exceptions to the rule.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  It seems like one thing that we like in an explanation is that it be broad and exceptionless. And so one thing that might happen is that if you have an explanation that only accounts for why your friend acts the way they do on Monday and Tuesday and Thursday, but not on Wednesday, you're going to think, I'm missing something, right? That can't be the whole story. There's something unsatisfying about that, and you're going to keep looking until you find something that accounts for more of your evidence.

• 36:13Shankar Vedantam?

  But I'm also thinking about how this could actually affect us adversely, which is that the real world, in fact, is a messy place. And there are times when, you know, a very good rule might actually explain 80% of a phenomenon. That could be an excellent rule. But the fact that it has, you know, 20% of exceptions to that rule, you know, if we start to rule those out as good explanations, we might rule out things that could actually be very useful.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  That's right. So one danger of trying to look for a good explanation is that the world is not always well behaved, as you point out. Sometimes the world doesn't provide good explanations. Sometimes things just are coincidences or are chance or don't have elegant explanations. So we've found in our research that sometimes that can be a good thing because people persist in trying to find a good explanation. And in the course of doing that, they might discover important things about the world. But other times, it might lead them to perseverate in trying to find a good explanation when there's just none to be had.

• 37:13Shankar Vedantam?

  And if you buy the idea that explanations in some ways provide us with pleasure, there is also potentially a risk here because it could be that some explanations, in fact, are more pleasurable than others. In fact, they feel like they fit better, they're more enjoyable to contemplate. And if we're drawn to explanations in part because we derive pleasure from them, it's quite likely that from time to time, we're going to draw, you know, the conclusion that the pleasurable explanation is the right explanation when in fact it's not.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  I think that's right. So in my own work, I sometimes talk about explanatory virtues, which are properties like simplicity that make an explanation good and that are often things that we should be seeking in science and everyday life. But we also fall prey to explanatory vices, characteristics of explanations that are seductive and that draw us in, but maybe aren't really good guides to how we ought to think about the world.

• 38:04Shankar Vedantam?

  How does this body of work play out when it comes to things like polarization and partisanship?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Well, I think explanation is sort of a funny process in that it can lead to two very diametrically opposed consequences. So typically, when we try to explain something, we're trying to accommodate it in the context of what we already believe. Part of what's going to make it simple and compelling is that it fits in with the assumptions that we're already working with. But sometimes trying to explain something might lead us to realize an inadequacy in our current theorizing. And so it might be the impetus for us to revise our beliefs. And you sometimes see this in the history of science. So explanation, on the one hand, can be a way to assimilate everything in the context of what you already believe.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  And it can also sometimes be a mechanism to spark belief revision and change. And I think what we see in the case of politics is that overwhelmingly, it ends up being a force that allows us to assimilate things in the context of what we already believe. Because often, political beliefs are deeply ingrained, tied to people's identities, and so on. I do think that explanation does have the potential to lead us to change our beliefs and not just to confirm the beliefs that we already have. But I think the political discourse we see right now makes it difficult for those kinds of conditions to obtain.

• 39:29Shankar Vedantam?

  And it's also the case that when we have strong views about something and we see a disconfirming piece of evidence that comes in, in some ways, it's easier to sort of find a way to discount the disconfirming piece of evidence than to revise the model that we have built up, especially if that model has been built up over time and with effort, right? This is why it's so hard, not just in politics, but in science as well, to let go of pet theories. And you've spent 20 years developing a theory. It's incredibly painful to let that theory go because some new fact has just arisen.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Often, this is referred to as explaining away. Right? So you see a discrepant observation and it's easy to think, oh, well, there must have been a mistake with the microscope that day, or somebody must have made a mistake copying down that number. So we find an alternative explanation that doesn't threaten our core beliefs in that case.

• 40:18Shankar Vedantam?

  And I can see this happening all the time in politics. You have a president whom you don't like and, you know, there's nothing that the president can do that can possibly make you think that this was a good decision because you're filtering everything now through the model that basically says this president is an abomination.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  That's right. And you also see it in the way that we think about social groups and stereotypes. So if you come across an individual who violates your views about a particular stereotype, you could revise the stereotype, but often that's not what people do. Often what people do is say, oh, well, this person doesn't fit the stereotype for such and such reason. They come up with an explanation for why that person is an exception. And doing that then allows them to maintain the belief they had about the general group and to preserve the stereotype.

• 41:02Shankar Vedantam?

  You've also cited research about how our drive for explanation and storytelling works in the criminal justice system. Can you talk about that research about how storytelling and explanations shape the practice of justice?

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Sure. There was a really influential model of juror decision making called the story model that was introduced by Pennington and Hasty. And their idea was that if you think about what a juror is doing as they have evidence presented to them, as they hear testimony, as they hear the prosecution and the defense and so on, is trying to construct something like a mental model that's a story of what happened. And the way people decide whether they're going to convict or not is by evaluating which story is better, which does a better job of accounting for all of the evidence. That might sound sort of innocuous, but it leads to some problematic consequences. So one of them is that if you change the order in which people hear testimony,

• 41:58Speaker 02

  such that it makes it easier or harder to construct the story that's consistent with the prosecution, for example, that will affect how likely it is that participants think that that story is the right one.

• 42:10Shankar Vedantam?

  In other words, both the defense and the prosecution, you know, hypothetically, are presenting the same facts, but one of them is constructing the story of the facts better than the other one. We're more likely to believe the side that presents the better story.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  That's right. And in this case, what makes it a better story is just the fact that it was presented in the right temporal order in which the events unfolded so that it was easier to construct that story in your mind.

• 42:34Shankar Vedantam?

  On September 11, 2016, this was 15 years after the World Trade Center attack, someone took a photo of the 9/11 memorial tribute in light. Two very powerful blue lights representing the Twin Towers were beamed into the sky. And at the top, there appeared to be a strange glowing figure. I want to play you a short news clip.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Two powerful lights soar into the air as a tribute to lives lost on 9/11. But look closer. There's an image atop the lights. The photo is now a worldwide sensation. Is this a trick of the light? Jesus? An angel? A cross? Beautiful. Amazing.

• 43:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk a moment, Tanya, about the role that some explanations might play in providing us with, in some ways, an emotional defense system, a way of sort of reconciling ourselves to things that might otherwise be very painful to contemplate?

• 43:30Speaker 02

  There's some evidence that when people feel uncertainty or a lack of control in their own lives, one response that they might have is to try to latch on to their ideology or an explanatory framework that gives them a sense of order in the world. And for some people, that might be religion. For other people, it might be a sense that the government is a very stable, powerful force that can provide order. It could be the idea that science gives us a very orderly picture of the world. But it does seem like the idea that there is structure and order and regularity is something that we're drawn to in the face of moments that seem anxiety provoking and to suggest that maybe the world is just random in a very uncomfortable way.

• 44:15Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm thinking about the study that Jennifer Whitson and Adam Gilinsky did several years ago. They induced a feeling of a lack of control among volunteers. And they found that compared to a control group, volunteers who experienced a lack of control showed increased pattern recognition in noise. So in other words, when they were shown like, you know, the static on a television screen, for example, they thought that they could see images in the television screen. Or when they were shown sort of random gyrations in the stock market, they felt like they could detect patterns in what was going on. And Jennifer Whitson and Adam Gilinsky thought that there was some connection between these two things, that in the presence of a feeling of a lack of control,

• 44:58Shankar Vedantam?

  we actually seek to impose control by seeing patterns where none exist. Can you talk about how this phenomenon, connected to your work, is potentially behind some of the conspiracy theories we see circulating in the world today?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  One idea, and I will confess this is somewhat speculative, but you might think of conspiracy theories as an error of over explaining.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Many conspiracy theories have the characteristic that they take lots of observations that might all have independent explanations that might sometimes be partially due to chance. And they connect them all to one underlying individual or group that has a particular intention and is carrying out that intention. And so that's a case where maybe there is no satisfying explanation for why these five independent observations came to be and how they unfolded exactly the way they do, but the conspiracy theorists impose one. And certainly, I think you see that these kinds of beliefs can be heightened in the context of uncertainty, lack of power, and so on.

• 46:09Shankar Vedantam?

  And, you know, when you think about the conspiracy theory that the United States government was behind the 9/11 attacks, for example, you know, the complexity of what would be involved in having a conspiracy like that actually work. I mean, I live and work in Washington and I know that you can't tell anything to a group of three people in Washington and expect it to be kept a secret for very long. You know, Washington is full of leaks. And so the idea that, you know, hundreds or thousands of people across the federal government could have kept this massive secret is just completely implausible. But of course, that's precisely the conspiracy theory that circulated very widely after the 9/11 attacks and was embraced by large numbers of people around the world.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  I think that's an interesting example because it illustrates a point that we spoke about before, that there's many different ways in which you might think that an explanation is simple or complex. So in one way, that conspiracy theory is extremely complicated because all of the details of how the government's plan would have been carried out and carried out effectively in a way that's consistent with the fact that we didn't have leaks and so on, that's all extremely complicated. But the part that's very simple is that many outcomes are all attributed to one underlying entity, in this case, or an organization rather than a single person, with a particular intention.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  And so in that sense, it might be a relatively simple explanation in that it reduces many observations to something that's sort of a simple root cause, even though the details of how that root cause manifests in what we observed is extremely complicated.

• 47:46Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked earlier in our conversation about the power of explaining in helping us understand things, that it actually could be a mechanism for learning. And you've talked before about how we can utilize this in some ways to combat some of our biases. So it is the case that we often seek explanations that match our pre-existing views, but how can we use explanations to combat this bias, Tanya?

• 48:09Speaker 02

  I think there's a few ways in which explanation can help us. One way it can help us relates to a previous example. We talked about the case where children will draw the lesson from a story that you should be kind to three-legged dogs, rather than realizing that there's something more general to be learned there. What we found in a study looking at cases like that is that just prompting someone to explain different parts of the story, why the characters acted the way they did, why something was the right or wrong thing to do, that can lead young children to re-represent the story such that they realize it's not just about a three-legged dog, but maybe more generally a story about social inclusion. So that's an example of explaining, leading us to change the way we're representing something

• 48:55Speaker 02

  in a way that helps us appreciate something at a broader level of abstraction.

• 49:01Shankar Vedantam?

  And it's interesting, when it comes to something like fighting conspiracy theories, we really don't practice what you just suggested. You know, we often believe the way to combat a conspiracy theory is to throw evidence against it. But really, the more effective approach might well be to ask the person with the conspiracy theory to actually explain it in depth to us and to have them in some ways discover the gaps in their own beliefs that are surfaced by this illusion of explanatory depth.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  That's right. In fact, there's some evidence in the political domain that asking people to explain policies, like how a particular tax policy would work, for example, helps them to appreciate that maybe they don't understand it as well as they thought they did. And that can induce a kind of humility or an appreciation that you might not be in the best position to have a very firm perspective on that political issue and perhaps be more open-minded and willing to revise your beliefs.

• 49:59Shankar Vedantam?

  There's been some work that shows that when we come up with explanations for things, we're more likely to actually believe those explanations. In other words, if I'm in a debating tournament, for example, and I'm randomly assigned to make one case, I'm more likely to believe the case that I'm making. So genuinely, the act of coming up with explanations and arguments prompts me to actually believe what it is that I'm arguing. And you and others have talked about the value of essentially, if you want to de-bias yourself, one thing to do is to try and make arguments in favor of both sides, that the effort of coming up with an argument in favor of both sides allows you to see the virtue of different positions that you might not otherwise choose to do.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So the strategy you just described is sometimes referred to as "consider the opposite." And it sounds very, very simple, but it's also very powerful and very broadly applicable. And part of the reason it's so powerful is because it's not something that we tend to do spontaneously. So if you're asked to consider a particular view, or coming up with an explanation for a particular observation, you tend not to spontaneously think, "But how might I be wrong?" Or, "What might some alternative perspectives be?" But doing that can be a very powerful way to avoid some of the kinds of biases that you refer to.

• 51:12Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if there have been times in your life where, looking back, you realize that you leaped to the wrong conclusion or drew the wrong explanation? Have there been moments like that when you've looked back at and sort of said, "Uh-oh, I fell prey to the same things that I'm studying?"

• 51:29Speaker 02

  I can think of one example. When I was a college student, so it was my birthday, and my boyfriend had planned what was supposed to be a nice dinner for me. And on the way to our dinner, he said, "Oh, you know what? I just need to get these books from the library. Do you mind if we just stop by and pick up these books? Here, you take these call numbers." So that we're fast. And my immediate temptation was to fit this into a frustrating pattern of having taken second place to immediate work concerns and so on, right? This was supposed to be my birthday. We shouldn't be doing this errand. And I very shortly discovered I had to revise this assessment, because it turns out that my then-boyfriend,

• 52:09Speaker 02

  now-husband, had hidden my birthday presents throughout the library at Stanford University under different call numbers. And so as I was walking around the library trying to get these books, I was discovering the hidden gifts hidden in the library.

• 52:25Shankar Vedantam?

  What a lovely story. And I feel like this tells us something really important, because of course, the story that we're painting about explanations is not just a story about how we think about politics, or how we think about science, but it's also about how we think about the people in our lives, our colleagues, our partners, our children, our parents. And so often, we're drawing these very quick explanations about why they're doing what they're doing. And very often, these conclusions are actually wrong. And we really need to slow down and ask ourselves, "How do I know what I think I know?"

• 52:57Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, absolutely. I think asking ourselves how we know what we think we know and thinking about alternative explanations are both very powerful tools for trying to overcome some of our tendencies to leap to conclusions and go with our familiar explanations.

• 53:17Shankar Vedantam?

  There's another domain in which we should ask ourselves how we know what we think we know. It has to do with the stories we tell about ourselves, stories about who we are, what we're capable of, and what our lives should look like. Recently, we heard from a listener named Julian. He's lived with depression for 16 years. Over time, it has shaped how he thinks of himself. He remembers one phase where he just felt numb. It made him feel helpless. Then Julian's therapist gave him a different way to think about it.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  The way that some of my counselors framed it is they're like, "The numbness was to protect you. You could not bear that much pain every day." So anyways, I just think that this reframe is so important, because it's empowering, and it just shows you, like, this is part of the normal human experience. I was lucky to have people frame it that way to me, and it really did help a lot.

• 54:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Often, when we're anxious or depressed, we have thoughts about our feelings. "I wish I wasn't so stressed out," or, "Why can't I just feel happy again?" These critical thoughts about our feelings can lead to even more negative feelings. But what if we asked ourselves a different question? What are my feelings telling me?

• 54:55Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, listeners share their thoughts and questions about how to reframe the low points in their lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 56:16Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 56:25Shankar Vedantam?

  We often think of sadness as a problem, something to fix. But at Cornell University, psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg says a different way to think about sadness is that it's a system in the brain that is designed to alert us to problems.

• 56:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Jonathan is the author of "The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic." He was recently on the show in an episode titled "Rethinking Depression," and in a Hidden Brain Plus episode titled "Flourishing After Depression." Today, Jonathan returns to the show to respond to listener questions and comments about his work. Jonathan Rottenberg, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me back.

• 57:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Jonathan, depression is often characterized as a chemical imbalance in our minds. You argue that this so-called defect model provides us with an incomplete picture. Why is that?

• 57:27Speaker 05

  Well, we've been looking for the biological defect, the cognitive defect, the defect in how people are functioning in their relationships with others for many, many decades. And it's not been found, because it's not as simple as that. Because depression is connected, as you alluded to, to a broader system of mood that helps us navigate the world, which can be triggered by a whole host of things, including this perception that my whole life path is under threat or in serious doubt.

• 58:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. You argue that depression can sometimes be a useful guide or tool. How so?

• 58:12Speaker 05

  Well, it's no accident that we have this mood system. We share it with our mammalian friends. It's served us well as an adaptation for millions and millions of years. It's there as a tried-and-true system, much like our system to help us preserve our body, give us pain when our tissues are being damaged. Our mood system is there to help us navigate really intractable kinds of problems, most obviously when there are situations where there isn't anything that people can do immediately, like in a famine. But more broadly, when people are in very complex, even interpersonal situations where there

• 58:52Speaker 05

  is no obvious solution, the mood system is there to make you retrench, and make you think about where you are and what you can do. And it's a very cognitive, kind of behavioral stop system that has, as I said, worked well for millions of years, but it also gets people into trouble in the sense that there are people who have chronic depression and severe depression, and it could have very destructive impacts as well.

• 59:22Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. Isn't it possible that there are people who are depressed, who are not, in fact, experiencing any kind of life challenge? Psychiatrists and psychologists point to people who come into their practices all the time, whose lives are going pretty well, but suddenly they are feeling extremely depressed?

• 59:39Speaker 05

  Yes, I believe that's the case. The mood system is integrating a whole host of different factors, things that weigh on us. So that includes our environment, our immediate social relationships, our life chances, but it also integrates our biology. So if you... Who, for example, have a serious illness? And so there are absolutely many people who have depression. And it turns out that there is a physical dysfunction that explains that. But the question is, is that the majority of people? Or in the majority of cases, does it have to do with environmental adaptation? Or some interaction, a connection between a person's disposition?

• 1:00:23Speaker 05

  So your temperament, how you tend to see the world? Are you temperamentally anxious? And the environment jointly? Both conspiring to make a person experience longer periods of depression than, say, the average person?

• 1:00:39Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, some people can hear you say that if depression can teach us things, then depression is a good thing. Is that what you're saying, John?

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  I think that we have a long history of treating depression simply as pathology, meaning that it would have nothing to teach us. And that simply doesn't connect to how people experience these episodes. It is the case that people are active in these episodes and they're trying to learn, what does it mean that I have this mood? People ask this question all the time. And in some cases, it is a meaningful question to ask, and it does lead to meaningful life change. That doesn't mean that every instance of depression is good. How could that possibly be true? Or that we always should interrogate every single time that we're feeling low mood, that this must be pregnant with cosmic meaning?

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  I don't think that's the case. But we do tend to err on the side of not asking the question, what can I learn from this?

• 1:01:40Shankar Vedantam?

  So we received a number of messages from people experiencing depression. Here's one from a listener named Mandy.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  I am deep in a really, pretty debilitating depression right now. I'm just coming up to an anniversary of my divorce from a marriage that I did not want to leave. And I am in a profession that, as a single person, makes it difficult for me to support myself. So I'm having to face leaving something that I love to do. And I am very, very, very upset about it all. And so much so that I actually called the suicide number,

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  which I have never done before, simply because I have been feeling like I just don't want to feel anymore. I really feel like my life doesn't have purpose or meaning, and nothing really matters. So it's very difficult for me right now to absorb anything in this mental state.

• 1:02:58Shankar Vedantam?

  So I really feel for Mandy, John. She is going through a very difficult time. As someone who went through a crushing depression yourself, what insights could you offer, Mandy?

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, just to acknowledge the humanity.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  Mandy is grappling with something that, like I experienced. I feel that it's a force larger than yourself that you can't control. I think it does illustrate the more general problem that depressed moods do have a rhyme or reason to them, even if we don't completely understand them. Because Mandy does talk about the dilemmas that she's facing in her work and in her relationships. And there's a sense of not knowing what her next step precisely is. And depression is kind of keeping her, I think, in this holding pattern,

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  trying to resolve, trying to think what my path out might be. But in the meantime, it's very painful. By her own accounting, her suffering is not meaningless, that she knows that she's in a tight spot. And her feelings are horrible, but they, on some level, make sense to her. I would advise her, depressions do end. They just end. They don't end always on your timetable, but they do end. And I say this particularly to anyone out there who is feeling like they're at the end of what they can tolerate.

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  So Mandy alluded to calling a suicide hotline, which I recommend anyone who is entertaining these kinds of thoughts do as one very useful thing. Because time is on your side. I know it can be hard to appreciate that when you're in the grips of something terrible. But I would say, from my experience and the experience in doing research on depressed people, is part of the illusion of a depressed episode is that it is going to go on forever. But it's not. It will get better. It may not get better on your timeline. It may not get better to the degree that you want it to get better. But there are so many things that one can do

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  in terms of different kinds of therapies, discovering what works for you in terms of your daily activities. And then, of course, also, to the extent that it does have to do with some intractable life dilemmas people do find, for example, the new activities, the new pursuits, that do provide that meaning that might be missing in the present. Either on their own, just with time, with the support of other people, with the support of a therapist. These mood states do tend to moderate. In the overwhelming, overwhelming majority of cases, they moderate.

• 1:06:04Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the tricky aspects of depression is that many people experience shame around their depression. So they feel bad about feeling bad. Here's listener Joshua.

• 1:06:14Speaker 05

  I found myself living with depression from a very young age. And it was very challenging. And I think a lot of it had to do with the comparisons that I would make of myself to others. And I did some pretty intense therapy, which, through that process, I discovered that my depression was actually a symptom of something greater. And my body telling me that something's not right, something needs to be better, something needs to change. I was able to start making those changes. I was able to give it a name. I was able to be kind to it. I was able to welcome it back instead of cursing it when it reared its ugly head. And that changed things a lot. It really revolutionized the way that I think about my sadness.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  And just to say, I own this now. This is mine, you know? It's part of me.

• 1:07:05Shankar Vedantam?

  John, can you talk about how shame can keep us from being thoughtful about depression? And how owning our depression, as Joshua puts it, can potentially help us work through it?

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  Sure. I think that Joshua's comment really illustrates how the way that we talk to ourselves about our depression, as we experience depression, has profound effects. And it sounds like when he was, earlier in his journey, he was very down on himself for being depressed. And part of that is making comparisons to other people and feeling that you're inferior to other people because of this mood. And it may actually bring up feelings of shame. But that way of talking to yourself doesn't have to be.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  And it sounds like, in his case, he became more compassionate to himself. So understanding that it made him the person that he is today, and in some ways, a stronger person. But I would say, as a culture, that we still have a long way to go as far as themes of shame being very deep, deeply connected to depression. And this being a complicating factor, because depression itself, the feelings are, they're horrible. They're unpleasant. They're hard to deal with. But then on top of that, feeling ashamed about the feelings, that the feelings themselves are unspeakable or unnameable, that's a double burden.

• 1:08:40Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked in our previous conversation about how depression can sometimes come with silver linings. Listener Jenny says she's been dealing with depression on and off since she was 13. Medication has helped, but she's recently found herself feeling depressed again. And with each bout, she says she forgets how she came through the last one.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  It's difficult, because every single time you go back into one, it's almost like you forget that you survived the others. But then, when someone reminds you, and in this case, it was my psychologist, she said, you've done this before. And I think there's a strength and a power in knowing that whatever you're going through, no matter how difficult it is, the fact that you got through something, got through something as bad as where your brain was telling you that you didn't deserve to be alive. There's a power in this.

• 1:09:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Strengthen that and there's confidence and reassurance because there's resilience. So, John, this echoes something you told me when we talked last. You two came through a terrible depression with a thought, you know, I'm still here. I'm still standing.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So I think Jenny is very wise. She understands that there's a little bit of an illusion that happens when you have recurrent episodes of depression, like it's almost Groundhog Day. Do you have this perception that you're waking up to the same thing, day after day after day? But she has a also realization that it isn't the same because she has gotten through this in the past. And I think there is an expectation that eventually, nothing is going to stop her because she has actually, like a lot of people who struggle with depression, learned a bit about how to cope with these episodes and also be able to put them in some perspective

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  in terms of the longer arc of her life. So when I hear Jenny talking, I'm hopeful. I mean, I'm sad that she's not having the best time of it right now, but her spirit is a good one.

• 1:10:49Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to find your way through the darkest of times. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

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• 1:11:35Speaker 07

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• 1:12:08Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Depression can be a terrible affliction, but is it also a tool we can use to change our lives?

• 1:12:19Shankar Vedantam?

  At Cornell University, Jonathan Rottenberg offers a hopeful take on depression. Today, he's responding to listener questions and comments about his work. John, depression can change how we view ourselves. Listener Anu received her first depression diagnosis in high school. She's now 27.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  I don't know who I am without my medication and I've been trying to stop and I want to find a way to feel who I am regardless of the depression. Not as something to fix, but as something to live with and see what it's telling me. And I think this episode came at a really timely time in my life where I'm realizing that having depression, whether chronic, whether it's just episodic, is not a bad thing. And so, thank you for helping me feel that.

• 1:13:15Shankar Vedantam?

  So, John, I'm wondering how you feel about Anu's question. You yourself took medication for many years and you found it helpful.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I want to answer Anu's concerns as a human being and as a scientist, not as a treating clinician. I know she's working with someone and will help her figure out if she does want to taper or stop her medication. But I do want to speak to the issues of identity that are very interesting that Anu is raising. This is a long arc from high school to age 27. And if you've been taking medication all this time, I could understand if you had some question about who you are under all that medication and are you, would you be a different person?

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  And so what I hear in her dialogue is this question about whether she can accept depression as part of life and even that she has this propensity to be depressed that's built into her personality. And I think that's a very, that's a very difficult thing to wrestle with. It's a very profound thing to wrestle with.

• 1:14:25Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to pivot to another idea, John. We frame depression as a chemical imbalance, but we heard from listeners who also point to environmental factors in shaping their depression. So listener Sarah writes, I have struggled with depression since my teen years. The experience was indescribable, frightening, and caused me to experience suicidal thoughts. Later, I realized that if I eat certain foods like sugar or gluten or milk products, they could trigger depressive thoughts in my brain. Sleep would also affect my anxiety. If I was with friends, I would have no signs of it. Winter was worse, summer pretty much nonexistent. So Sarah also told us that her depression would change based on the time of day or if she listened to music.

• 1:15:09Shankar Vedantam?

  Can factors like these in our environments shape our feelings of depression, John?

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So the systems that are making for clinical depression, for really severe mood states are the same. They overlap with the systems that are generating a normal mood. So we know absolutely that if your sleep is disturbed or if your diet is poor, that that can affect your mood. What I hear in Sarah is someone who's searching to better understand the sources of mood. And I do think broadly, the chemical imbalance kind of theory tends to blind people and/or it tends to make people not try to search for the sources of their mood.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  When, when one can learn, I hear a kind of a learning journey in what Sarah is saying, that she's over time learned that certain foods, sugar, that certain sleep patterns or certain times of the year are trouble spots for her. And so, again, this is pointing to the ways that people are actually quite active in confronting their depressed mood states. And this is empowering to have this ability to, to know what is the key factors for me. But absolutely, these quasi-biological, but also behavioral in sleep factors are definitely part of the equation.

• 1:16:37Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, what I find so relatable about Sarah's comments is that depression often feels like it's outside our control. But as you say, if we can be curious about our moods and ask when we are feeling what, in some ways, it gives us a little more control. I mean, we can't control the weather or the season, but we can decide to spend time with friends or to get, to get more sleep.

• 1:16:57Speaker 03

  Yes, but a number of the comments have really underlined this kind of a dialectic or a tension between wanting control and accepting that I will never have perfect control. Because moods are not something that you can dial up or dial down, like pushing a button for climate control, that you want it to be 67 rather than 66. The knowledge and the will to try to change the things you can, but the wisdom to know when there is going to be some need to accept some level of depressed mood is this kind

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  of wisdom that I think people can evolve over time to have both, both controlling what you can control and accepting that you won't have perfect control, but you'll have some.

• 1:17:51Shankar Vedantam?

  So, John, artists like Vincent van Gogh, or Sylvia Plath, or Amy Winehouse, experienced considerable mental distress in the course of their lives. Listener Jeffrey is 55 years old and says that he's experienced depression his entire life, but he thinks that creativity it produces might be a silver lining.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  What I've come to realize is that the depressive times of my life have been the most introspective times. And the periods coming out of depression have often been my most creative periods. And so while I don't relish depression, I'm suspicious of people who want to remove depression from our experience, who want to cure us of our depression, because I think that might cure us of our creativity.

• 1:18:45Shankar Vedantam?

  So I know there's research on the relationship between bipolar disorder and creativity, John. What do you make of Jeffrey's thesis?

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  Well, there are a lot of people who have extraordinary talents in one domain or another, and certainly art is one, who feel, and I think the data do support, that there is some connection between being able to create great poetry, or novels, or paintings, or music, and having a somewhat elevated propensity to depression and bipolar mood disorders. But I think the more profound insight that Jeffrey is raising is that this is kind of a double edged sword, this predisposition. It's part of who you are. It's part of what makes you an amazing person.

• 1:19:33Shankar Vedantam?

  But it's also, the sword can cut you. So the question is, how can you know that this is part of who you are, this vulnerability, while also minimizing its destructiveness? So you have less depression rather than more depression and more like the periods he describes coming out of his depression where he was very creative and feeling much better about life. So there are some people who can still function despite having really intense symptoms. That wasn't the case for me, and that isn't the case for a lot of people. So depression can manifest differently for different people. And I think it can be problematic to generalize, you know, from one person.

• 1:20:15Shankar Vedantam?

  So I would never generalize from my experience to the millions and millions of people who experience depression.

• 1:20:29Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, listeners weigh in on how to think about depression. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 1:21:49Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Jonathan Rottenberg is a psychologist at Cornell University. He's the author of The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. John, we received some critiques about your work. Listener Mark writes, I know that was not your guest's intention, but framing depression as something with a silver lining that can actually be beneficial just makes me feel more ashamed that I haven't turned my depression into anything positive. For me, depression has only caused bad decisions, destructive behavior, and suffering. This is exactly the wrong message for some people who are already depressed. It doesn't help. It piles extra guilt and shame on top of the pain.

• 1:22:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, John, I'm not hearing you say that if people feel sad and miserable about their depression that they're doing something wrong. Obviously, people going through serious mental illness have a lot on their hands, and the last thing they need is for someone to tell them that it's their fault if they can't see the silver lining. But how would you respond to Mark's heartfelt criticism? Well, I love the point, and maybe it allows me to clarify that what I'm saying is that depression can have a silver lining and that the scientific community has really ignored even the possibility that depression can have a silver lining by exclusively focusing on the obviously destructive outcomes that can be associated with depression as well,

• 1:23:19Shankar Vedantam?

  whether that's other mental health problems, problems with your physical health, and God forbid, suicide. So my research really is intended to help provide realistic hope, meaning that there's a recognition both of these very bad outcomes and the possibility of good outcomes. What I'm saying is that to a perhaps counterintuitive, or to a greater degree than one might expect, depression often is connected to our life story, to what our mood system is designed to do, which is to help us navigate the often rocky shoals of life.

• 1:24:00Shankar Vedantam?

  A sociologist named Douglas wrote with a concern that your thesis leaves out the structural factors that shape depression. He writes, "The episode's central insight that low mood may serve an adaptive function strikes me as both important and humane. At the same time, I found myself wishing the episode had engaged more deeply with the broader social context in which depression is experienced today. In the American context, when the good life is defined in highly individualistic and often unattainable terms, widespread experiences of anxiety, disappointment, and depression are easily interpreted as personal failures rather than as responses to a disordered social environment.

• 1:24:44Shankar Vedantam?

  My concern is that an exclusively adaptive or evolutionary framing, however well-intentioned, may inadvertently normalize what are in fact structurally produced conditions of distress." What do you think, John? Well, in some ways, I couldn't agree more. So part of the environment is a bigger environment where it's sensible to have some degree of depression and anxiety. I understand that things like a war or an economy that is not producing life chances for people like it used to, or the recognition that our environment is being despoiled. I mean, I think those might be some of the structural factors that he's alluding to.

• 1:25:27Shankar Vedantam?

  And I think that's a normal response in many ways. But I very much believe that depression is not only an individual experience, that it's something that is happening because many people are in the same scenarios. And in part, there are social scenarios, or even you could say national or global scenarios. So I think actually my thinking is very potentially compatible with Douglas's sociological perspective. I think also that when you think about these problems as having environmental or structural factors, as Douglas points out, it also raises questions about how we respond to them.

• 1:26:12Shankar Vedantam?

  So for example, if people are going through a very bad economy, or they're going through a war, for example, and they're experiencing depression and trauma, it's a little problematic to say, we're locating this problem entirely in this person's brain, and we need to fix the chemical imbalance in their brain, while ignoring the structural factors that are causing the problem in our brain. Completely. And one thing that really amazes me is when you've looked at periods where collectively there was a massive shock. So for example, the Great Depression, World War II. You would expect with such a difficult environment that there would be millions and millions

• 1:26:56Shankar Vedantam?

  of people, there would be a big spike in depression and anxiety. But I don't believe that was the case. And it's very interesting why that wasn't the case, because people actually saw it as a collective problem, that I'm not uniquely facing this, I'm facing this with others. And there's a lot, there's a lot of bonding that happens between people when we're going through struggle together that reshapes the nature of that, that suffering and makes it more tolerable. If 25% of people don't have a job, you're in such good company, it makes it a lot easier than if only 6% don't have a job, or if it's just in this one demographic of young people.

• 1:27:40Shankar Vedantam?

  And so, you know, I think there is a lot to be said for understanding that we have a choice sometimes of seeing our problems, either uniquely us as an individual or part of a collective problem. And I'm not saying that we should see every single, every time someone is depressed, it means that it's a common dilemma. But again, I think we could use a little bit more of that.

• 1:28:09Shankar Vedantam?

  We also received a question from a listener named Sam. He's a physician and frequently works with people grappling with suicidal thoughts. He questions the idea that depression really serves an evolutionary purpose.

• 1:28:23Speaker 05

  While I'm a proponent of evolutionary theory, I see a growing tendency to attribute all ailments to evolution, even when they don't serve evolution's primary goal, which is the survival of the species. One could even argue that if we must assign a purpose to suicide and depression, it would be the removal of the individual from the reproductive cycle. However, the reality is that evolution is often random and does not always serve a constructive purpose.

• 1:29:02Shankar Vedantam?

  As a physician, Sam also says there's a big difference between low mood and clinical depression.

• 1:29:08Speaker 05

  Depression, as I see it in clinical practice, is debilitating dark cloud that often robs a person from the ability to reflect or change. In the suicide cases that I've managed, the state of mind is closer to a temporary insanity fueled by despair. While we may not fully understand the root cause of depression, evidence-based medicine shows that chemicals are the primary culprit. We should never minimize the value of medication and counseling by reducing depression to a merely evolutionary product.

• 1:29:54Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, John? So I think that we do have this adaptation that's given us a mood system that is part of our equipment, and it leads us to be susceptible both to normal range of depressed mood and these more severe depressed periods. And it's a lot of the same factors that push people into, quote unquote, normal depression versus really severe depression. And this doesn't mean that every instance of depressed mood is serving the individual or serving the species. I think there can actually be a mismatch between our adaptation, which took millions

• 1:30:38Shankar Vedantam?

  and millions of years to come about, in our current environment. And in fact, I talked a little bit about that. In the in the episode, but that may be what's driving people to have so much more depression than in the past, including some really severe episodes of depression. So I quite agree with Sam that depression can become so so intense that a person can even become disconnected from reality. There is a thing called psychotic depression, where someone might believe that they're not just a bad person, but that they're the devil, or that they're responsible for all the sins of the world. So I absolutely think that there are destructive forms of depression, but they are built from,

• 1:31:23Shankar Vedantam?

  to a greater extent than maybe contemporary medicine would like to acknowledge, out of this perfectly good adaptation.

• 1:31:33Shankar Vedantam?

  So I think I hear Sam saying that in what he heard from the episode, he heard you minimizing the importance of treatment, the importance of medication, the importance of psychotherapy. There is some tension here, because at one level, you're saying, you know, be curious about your depression. Ask yourself if your depression can teach you something. Is there a silver lining in depression? But you're also saying depression is terrible, and I'm not averse to treatment and medication. What is that balance that you're trying to reach here, John? I think it's just based factually. Our mood system is open to different inputs. So part of being literate about your mood is to know that your own efforts to understand

• 1:32:14Shankar Vedantam?

  your mood and to change your behavior can be part of what gets you through the night. For other people, psychotherapy is extremely helpful in better understanding the sources of your mood. And for still other people, medication is extraordinarily helpful. Clinical depression is a quite formidable adversary, and I'd be the last person to discourage people from getting any kind of help that they find useful to them. And what I find really encouraging is that we actually have lots of different levers to move the mood system. So rather than really fighting over, is medication OK? Or should people not take medication?

• 1:32:57Shankar Vedantam?

  I would be one to celebrate the data that seem to show that, at least for a significant subset of people, medication is a very useful tool. But if that doesn't work for people, there are other brands of therapy, other brands of psychotherapy, that have been shown to be helpful. So I see it really more as an all of the above kind of approach, rather than prescribing what people should or shouldn't do.

• 1:33:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to end on this note from listener Angela. She says she learned something important about her depression from her four-year-old daughter.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  There was one afternoon, after the darkness had lifted, after my life had returned back to normal, and I could care for my family, my three young children. That afternoon, I was cutting vegetables, preparing for supper, when my daughter, who was four at the time, caught me off guard by a profound statement. She said, "Broken crayons still color, mommy." I, yeah, I didn't know what to think. I had forgotten that I had taught her that she could color with a broken crayon, when she had been in tears one day when one had broken.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  Then I couldn't help but thinking that I felt like a broken crayon. And so if I were to write a book about my mental health journey, that would be the title, Broken Crayons Still Color, Mommy. So, but I wanted to share, even with my bipolar diagnosis, I can live a life that, even if I feel like the stigma of it, that I'm no different than anybody else. I just learned to live with it. And I am not bipolar.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  I am me, and I'm a mother, I'm a wife, I'm a friend, and there is hope. So if if I would share anything, I would want to share hope with whoever is struggling out there. This is my story.

• 1:35:09Shankar Vedantam?

  I was so moved by that note, John. What do you hear in Angela's story?

• 1:35:15Shankar Vedantam?

  I think children are very wise. So a four-year-old really said it all. I love the title of her book. I might suggest a slightly different title than Broken Crayons Still Color. I see it as, not only do they color, but despite the terrible challenges you've had, that you're beautiful, we see you, you're beautiful, your child sees you, and that despite, and maybe because of the things you've overcome, you're even more beautiful than you were before.

• 1:35:58Shankar Vedantam?

  Jonathan Rottenberg is a psychologist at Cornell University. He is the author of The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. John, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. It was such a pleasure.

• 1:36:18Shankar Vedantam?

  We also heard today from Tania Lombroso. She's a psychologist at Princeton University and author of the book, Why We Ask Why: The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand.

• 1:36:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Powell, Kristen Wall, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:36:56Shankar Vedantam?

  If you liked this episode, please be sure to share it with a friend or family member. And for more Hidden Brain, please check out our YouTube channel. You can find us at youtube.com/hithiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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