Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. How should we live? What will make us happy? How can each of us become the person we want to be? In our modern world, there are all kinds of people eager to provide us with answers to these questions. Mental health gurus, self-help authors, social media influencers, even the researchers we feature on the show. But there is an important mistake we make when we seek out such counselors.
we usually look to sources of wisdom that are around us. We assume the most valuable answers to our questions must come from people who happen to inhabit the planet at the same time that we do. But humans have wrestled with the same questions about relationships, purpose, and identity for thousands of years. Wouldn't the wisest people who lived centuries ago have useful things to say about our modern dilemmas?
This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion piece on our subscription feed, Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the insights of five great thinkers from ancient Greece. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Nintendo. Discover so many ways for the whole family to play with the Nintendo Switch system. With an awesome roster of games, there's something for everyone.
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It's your journey. It all starts with a yes.
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We plan to reach out to a friend who's sick, or we resolve to start a new exercise program. And then, we don't. Befuddled and surprised, we try again, and fall short again. Psychologists have come up with a number of explanations for this gap between our intentions and our actions, and what we can do to close it. At Yale University, the philosopher Tamar Gendler says questions like this also animated a thinker in ancient Greece.
The highest wisdom, and our greatest challenge, he argued, is to know ourselves. Tamar Gendler, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. So Tamar, Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Can you set the stage for me by describing who this man was and how he came to wrestle with some of the same questions that we wrestle with today?
Socrates lived about 2,500 years ago in ancient Athens, and he was kind of like a provocative podcaster. He hung out in what was the most technologically advanced location of the time. That is, he hung out in a place called the Agora, which was the public square.
And as people passed him by, he asked them questions that caused them to examine their fundamental beliefs. And eventually he developed a following of some of the young men of Athens who were associated with the most powerful families.
And he spoke to those young men and he asked them to think in a very fundamental way about which of the values that they had been taught were values to which they were reflectively committed and which of them were just coincidental features of their society. That is, really, were the things that they had been taught are just, just, right?
Were the things that they had been taught are pious? Pious. Were the things that they had been taught about the gods true? And were the families of these kids excited that they were learning from this wise man or were they horrified?
The families of these children, remember, are the individuals who are in the primary power structure of Athens for whom belief in tradition is crucial for sustaining their regime.
So they are, in fact, extraordinarily upset by what Socrates is doing to their kids. So upset that they actually put him on trial with the accusation that he has violated the laws of the city by corrupting the youth.
Ultimately, Socrates is actually convicted by an Athenian jury of having corrupted the youth, is given the penalty of death by the drinking of poison.
and makes his final lesson for his students by obeying the laws of the city and taking his life in accord with the city's mandate that he be punished by death for corruption of the youth. So he really was committed to the deep truth of what he aimed to teach, so much so that he was willing to give his life for it.
Did Socrates or any of his students question the justice of the sentence that was handed down to him? Absolutely. And there's an extraordinarily moving story of Socrates' students trying to persuade him to resist this death sentence and of Socrates responding that he needs to accede to the laws of the city in which he has been nurtured and grown.
So during the trial of Socrates, one of his students visits the oracle at Delphi, and the student has a question for the oracle. What is the question, Tamar? The student visits the oracle at Delphi, which is a mystical place where truth is available, and asks the oracle, who is the wisest of all men?
And the oracle answers in a very perplexing way. The oracle says, no man is wiser than Socrates. So the student comes back from the oracle to bear this news to Socrates. And Socrates says, how could it be that I am considered the wisest of all men? For I know nothing.
and recognize that I know nothing, whereas others who also know nothing falsely think that they know. Now, Socrates was a pretty smart guy, and he must have known he was a pretty smart guy. So is he being falsely modest here? I mean, what aspect of the world does Socrates not know about that he says that I know nothing? What is he referring to here, Tamar? Even if Socrates is being falsely modest when he says, I know that I know nothing,
He is also saying knowing the limits of your knowledge is essential to understanding the limits of human understanding. One of the really crucial things that Socrates recognizes is
is that he has neither a full understanding of the world outside of him, nor does he have a full understanding of the world inside of him, a full understanding of his own thoughts and motivations.
So partly what he's describing here is not just a description of his own state of knowledge, but about the difficulty of acquiring that knowledge, the fact that when he looks inside, he in fact is not completely aware of his own motivations and drives.
I would say it is both a factual descriptive claim and a more profound claim about the nature of knowledge. So an important thing to understand about the picture of the world that Socrates holds is that human beings themselves...
are subject not only to the general constraint that as imperfect, concrete, earthly beings, we can't know anything fully true and fully good. But in addition, human beings are particularly complicated objects for human beings to understand.
So the suggestion is not just that he discovers that he doesn't know his motivations and he doesn't know all the internal features of himself. It's that in addition, he has a proof, a reason to think that that is impossible.
You know, I feel that there are literally hundreds of modern psychological experiments that back up this idea, Tamar. Political partisans seem to have no awareness that their loyalties shape what they hear and how they think. Biases pervade how we think about race or gender, but we are not always aware that we have these biases.
And in our relationships, people fall into, you know, unconscious patterns of behavior in ways that are really damaging to those relationships. I mean, all of these examples and the context might be very different from ancient Greece, but Socrates was interested in some of the same underlying questions here.
In my classes, I often juxtapose this Socratic tradition with the big question of social psychology of the 20th century and in many ways of the 21st century as well, which is a scientific demonstration of the dissociation between apparent motivation and the
actual explanation of a particular kind of behavior. Over and over and over again, the lesson of contemporary social psychology is that we are opaque to ourselves with regard to why it is we are doing or experiencing what we are doing or experiencing.
In her work, Tamar draws connections not only between ancient philosophers and modern social scientists, but themes that have animated writers for many centuries. For example, she cites the novel Anna Karenina by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Which is about the ways in which characters don't realize that their perception of the world is shaped through their individual mood.
There's a beautiful moment where a character named Levin has fallen in love with a young woman named Kitty. And he walks around the world and he can only recognize how beautiful the world is. And he takes it to be a fact about the world that the world is beautiful.
There's a subsequent scene where the main character, Anna, is dismayed about a fact in her life, and she walks around the world and she perceives the world as being filled with individuals who are ugly and mean. This is not unique to Anna Karenina. Every single novel is about the ways in which characters fail to recognize their own motivations.
And so I would say those are three examples: the Socratic example, the example of literature, and the social-psychological example of 20th century empirical psychology, all of which are exploring in incredibly rich ways the fact that human beings do not know themselves.
So you suggest that we can try and derive self-knowledge by engaging in the kind of Socratic dialogue that Socrates himself engaged in with his students. How would that work, Tamar? Socrates basically is willing to ask why repeatedly.
So an inner Socratic dialogue involves being ready to reflect at any moment, why do I think that? On what evidence is my judgment based? For what reason am I pursuing this action? So in many ways, what Socrates is asking us to do
is to engage in a process of inner reflection. Any moment, being ready with fully open mind to ask ourselves why we think what we think or why we are doing what we are doing. So in other words, am I really in love with this person? Am I really happier when I make lots of money? Am I just absorbing what the culture is telling me or do I really believe this?
So those are big questions and you could certainly apply the Socratic technique to that, but you could use it. Why did I open the fridge? Am I bored? Am I hungry? Am I low on electrolytes?
You could ask the question, why did I pick up my phone? You could ask the question, why am I feeling irritated right now? Are my socks wet? Or is the world full of injustice to which I am appropriately sensitive? So yes, you want to ask questions, do I really want to make money? And you also want to ask questions like, why did I open the fridge? Socrates taught us that self-knowledge is the foundation for human flourishing.
But one of his students pointed out a complication. We don't just have one self inside ourselves, we have many. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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Socrates had a very smart student named Plato. He pointed out, there isn't one singular self for us to get to know. In fact, we have many selves inside us. Tamar, I understand that you have personally experienced the reality of a divided self when it comes to the subject of shoes. Tell me more.
I am somebody who is a great appreciator of the capacity to bring joy and beauty to one's life through self-ornamentation, particularly with regard to the adornment of one's feet. That is a fancy way of saying I love buying used designer shoes on the internet.
I am, however, not always able to tell whether a shoe will fit me. And consequently, a certain portion of the time, I need to return those shoes back.
One of the things that stuns me is right now in the back of my car is a box of shoes to be returned, which have been there with the label taped to them for the last two weeks. I have been unable to bring myself to mail these shoes back. Yeah.
So is this divided self, the divided self that says, I need to do something, but I don't have the time or willingness or motivation to do it? Or is this divided self an example of, I think I should return these shoes, but there's another part of me that says, I want to keep these shoes.
In this particular case, it is all of me rationally that thinks I want to return these shoes. And then part of me that engages in what my friend Lori Santos has taught me to understand as obliger rebellion. That is, it is fun not to do a thing that I am supposed to be doing.
The shoes don't fit. I need to return them by a certain deadline. If I return them, the money that I spent on them will be refunded to me in such a way that I can buy shoes or use it in some much more useful way. But within me, in addition to the fully endorsed desire to return those shoes...
There is a certain amount of pleasure that attaches to simply not doing what I reflectively know is the right thing for me to do. I'm wondering if there are other dimensions of your life, Tamar, where you again feel like you have these two cells inside you that are at war with each other. At almost every moment, all of us have multiple sides of ourselves that are at war with each other. ♪
When I am exercising in the gym, there's a part of me that thinks, keep going forward, and a part of me that thinks, I'm exhausted. I'm just going to sit down. I don't feel like working any harder.
When I need to get somewhere at a particular time, there's a part of me that knows if I need to be somewhere by one o'clock, then presumably I need to leave where I am sometime before one o'clock. But that's also a part of me that has this incoherent fantasy that I can leave the place where I am at one and be at the place where I'm going at one. Uh-huh.
You know, Freud has this wonderful description that all of us have a part of ourselves that is infantile and inconsistent, where we want things that are mutually inconsistent or we believe things that are mutually inconsistent. That is just deeply true of all of us. And that part of ourselves just never goes away. And that's the part of you that thinks you can have your cake and eat it too.
that things that are actually reflectively impossible could just happen. So Plato was one of the ancients who started to think about the phenomenon of the divided self. What was his story, Tamar? So Plato was a philosopher who lived in ancient Greece, also about 2,500 years ago. He was a student of Socrates.
Plato was responsible for writing down a large set of philosophical dialogues that explored almost any question that was available at the time when he lived.
What's the nature of justice? What's the nature of truth? What is the nature of the divine? How should a society be structured? What should education look like? What is it to wage war? For any of the big questions about the individual or society, Plato wrote what is basically a play where the main character was his teacher, Socrates, and
And Socrates would engage in conversations about these questions with various imaginary and real young men. So Plato observes that we not only have multiple selves, but that these cells are often set against each other, that we are a house divided?
Plato tells a story that's basically my story of not returning the shoes or the story of somebody who is rubbernecking on the highway when they pass an accident.
So the story that Plato tells is that there's a man, his name happens to be Leontius, and he's walking back to the city of Athens. And he notices along the wall of the city a dead man lying on the ground in a really gross way. And Leontius struggles with himself in the way that you might if you were driving past a car accident. And Leontius says to himself,
Don't look at that. That's disgusting. What are you doing?
And then Leontius turns his face towards the dead body, holds his eyes open and says, take a look at that beautiful sight you loathsome creatures. That is, he gives in to his temptation. And you might imagine a similar story, which is opening the refrigerator and saying to yourself, I'm not going to eat the cake. I'm not going to eat the cake. And then just giving in to your temptation.
So Plato tells this story of Leontius, which is the story of eating the cake in the fridge, which is the story of rubbernecking, which is the story of me not returning the shoes, in order to establish a picture that he has of what human beings are like. And the picture that he ends up introducing is that he says the human soul is, and by soul he just means the human mind,
So the human soul, says Plato in the translation that's most common, is composed of three parts. There's a part that he calls reason, there's a part that he calls spirit, and there's a part that he calls appetite. And how do these three relate to one another, Tamara? So the part of the soul that he calls reason, Plato likens to the driver of a chariot.
And that's the part of you that's rational and easily available to introspection. Reason is the stories that you tell yourself and the parts of yourself that are in keeping with your reflective commitments. But, says Plato, reason is only a small part of the human being.
Reason is driving a chariot that is pulled by two horses, and he calls those horses Spirit and Appetite.
The horse that he calls spirit is responsive to social norms and social approval. That is, the spirited part of yourself is worried about things like FOMO and what people think of you and what it's like to be in love and admired and all of the things that we care about in our social interactions.
And the third part of yourself, what Plato calls the appetitive horse, is basically concerned with the parts of you that you share with non-human animals. Basically, the things that are required for survival and procreation, that is food and sex.
So, says Plato, think of yourself as having three parts. A part that you share with non-human animals that's full of appetites for things like procreation and consumption. A part of you that's concerned with social standing and affection and human connection.
very small part of you that's supposed to be in charge, which is the part of you that is distinctly human and capable of reason and reflection. It's fascinating, Tamar. As you're talking here, I'm again hearing echoes of the work of Sigmund Freud. Indeed. There are echoes of Plato's picture in every world wisdom tradition.
So Sigmund Freud distinguishes three parts of the human being, which he calls the ego, the superego, and the id. It doesn't exactly align with Plato's picture. Freud's id is very much aligned with what Plato thinks is the part of the soul that is filled with appetite.
But some of what Plato would call the spirited part of the soul might fit into Freud's id. Freud's superego is the part that roughly corresponds to Plato's reason. And the ego in Freud's picture is its own complicated self.
But the idea that you can use some metaphoric description to make sense of human beings and their inner life is universal. In the Buddhist tradition, in contrast to speaking of a charioteer and two horses, it's traditional to speak about an elephant and a rider who sits atop the elephant and plays the role of the charioteer.
And we, of course, explored the ideas of Danny Kahneman, whose famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow, also suggests that we are a house divided. And in fact, we have these different modes of thinking inside our heads. So if you think about the dual processing tradition,
of which Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the most famous proponents, what you're getting there is an exact echo of this Buddhist or Platonic picture. Here's the way to think about it. The rider on the Buddha's elephant and the charioteer in Plato's metaphor is
is what Kahneman and Persky would call system two. That's the thinking slow part. And the elephant and Plato's horses and all of our drives and instincts
are what Kahneman and Persky would call system one. That is the set of autonomous systems that operate fast. The thinking fast part of ourselves are these horses who just run off in whatever direction they're used to,
slow part of ourselves is this poor charioteer who's trying to keep the horses in line. So when I'm not returning my shoes, the horse, which just wants to run off and do fun things and not go to the post office, is just dashing off in its system oney kind of way. And then my
And then my little poor rider, which wants to return the shoes, it isn't doing so because my charioteer isn't strong enough to control my horses. That's the story of system one and system two. But notice this is right there in almost identical metaphoric form in the tradition of ancient Greece and in the tradition of ancient Buddhism.
I understand, Tamar, that there are resonances here, not just in the works of economists and psychologists, but also in the work of modern neuroscientists, looking at how it is the brain comes to have these two different systems inside our heads.
Absolutely. So you might think of the idea of system two as being a way of identifying behaviorally something that corresponds to the thought that takes place in the very front of our brain, in the prefrontal cortex.
And you might think of system one as the amalgamation of the rest of the things in our brain. It is completely unsurprising that anybody who has thought about human experience over the last 3,000 years has noticed that we are pulled in different directions given that our brains are accumulated amalgamations of relatively independent systems
each of which is designed to give us particular information about the world. So, of course, we are pulled in different directions. Did Plato believe that the state of internal division was inevitable and unchangeable? So, Plato believed that human flourishing came about by getting your parts aligned.
What Plato wanted you to try to do was to train your social horse, that is what he calls your spirited horse, and to train your appetite-driven horse so that they were inclined to follow the commands of reason. Take the story of my returning the shoes or of Leontius rubbernecking at the body at the side of the wall of Athens.
points out that I'm unhappy with myself when this happens. Leontius is unhappy with himself when that happens. We are in a state where our soul feels divided to us. We feel pulled in different directions. What Plato suggests is we are best off when what it is that we want to do and what it is that we're inclined to do coincide.
So that you're not fighting against the parts of yourself. You're just moving together in the way that you do when you are doing something that comes naturally. Socrates emphasized the importance of self-knowledge. His student Plato highlighted the need to bring our conflicting inner selves into harmony. But how? One of Plato's students had an idea about this, an idea with many modern echoes. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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Just visit simplisafe.com slash brain. That's simplisafe.com slash brain. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Yale University, philosopher Tamar Gendler has studied the work of ancient thinkers for clues on how to handle our modern dilemmas. One of these thinkers emphasized the importance of good habits.
Tamara, I understand that you had trouble with your balance. So you started working on your balance to the point it has now become something of a habit? You are correct. As I entered the decade of life in which I currently find myself, one that starts with the number of fingers that we have on a single hand, I discovered that my balance wasn't as good as it had been previously.
So I wanted to make sure that I spent a certain amount of time every day working on my balance. And I had read a lot of the literature on habits and on the way in which when you want to cultivate a new habit, you should chain it to an old habit. And the thing that I do most consistently for two minutes every morning and two minutes every evening is to brush my teeth. I have an electric toothbrush that does 30 seconds four times.
So what I started to do was for each 30-second segment to stand on one foot while I brushed my teeth. And this ended up having fabulous consequences. One was that actually I practiced standing on one foot for four minutes a day, two minutes on each foot while I was brushing my teeth.
The second thing that happened is that it came to be a cue for me that when I am holding something in my hand, I should lift one of my feet and stay in balance. And so I noticed that not only do I spend four minutes a day while I brush my teeth standing on one foot in ways that have helped me with my balance.
But very often, if I pick up a pen or an umbrella or a small tote bag that I'm holding with my hand, I will lift up one of my feet because it is an overlearned association between holding something in my hand and lifting a foot. Yeah, so it's interesting how these habits at some level, it's precisely because they are unthinking that they are so powerful.
One of the things that is extraordinary about the human brain is that it only has one trick, which is follow the easiest pathway, right? In some sense, our brain is like chat GPT. It's doing the most likely thing given the configuration of things that have happened before.
And so in some really literal sense, the more you do something, the more you are likely to do something. Your brain's job is to minimize its energy expenditure. And the way that it does that is by doing the thing that is relatively easiest. And the thing that is relatively easiest is the thing that it has learned how to do before. That is what it is to learn.
Well, of course, you know, standing on one leg when you pick up a pen, you know, maybe your students will sort of raise an eyebrow at you, but it's perfectly harmless. But you can imagine habits that can have slightly bigger consequences. If you're traveling overseas, for example, and you're used to traffic being on one side of the road and the traffic in the city that you're in is now on the other side of the road, that could have important consequences if you bring the same habits to bear.
I spent a bit of time in England last summer. And no matter how many times I said to myself, they drive on the left, I was repulsed.
Shocked as I crossed the street by the direction from which cars were coming and had I tried to sit at the wheel of a vehicle which would of course would have been on the wrong side of the car I would have found it almost impossible to drive and one of the things that causes you to realize is how habitual your responses are. So one of Plato's students was very interested in the power of habits. Tell me the story of Aristotle.
So Plato had a student named Aristotle who was in some sense the first encyclopedist. He was the first person to write down everything there was to know about the world around him. So Aristotle collected the constitutions from every city-state in the ancient Greek world and
Aristotle did all sorts of scientific experiments in physics and biology, collected zoological specimens. And Aristotle also thought about the entire range of philosophical questions that had been raised by his teacher Plato and Plato's teacher Socrates. And he wrote them down in various forms and delivered them to students as lectures and
And his views about what it is to live a good life have survived in an extraordinary volume, basically of lecture notes, known as the Nicomachean Ethics. In that book, Aristotle describes what it takes to be a flourishing human being, given all the facts that Aristotle knows.
How should human beings live? So Aristotle sums up his view about virtue in a single line in this great work. What does he say, Tamar? He says that virtue is acquired through habit, that just as one becomes a harpist by playing the harp, just as one becomes a builder by
by practicing the art of building, so too does one become brave by acting bravely, moderate by acting moderately, kind by acting kindly. So in other words, if you want to become a particular kind of person, you practice being that kind of person and that's the person you become.
Yeah, so what Aristotle is saying is practice, practice, practice. Fake it till you make it. You are what you do. You learn what you live. Every poster that you've ever seen in a doctor's office that says children learn what they live is an example of the Aristotelian lesson that things that we do a lot become things that we do naturally.
I mean, it almost sounds like a tautology. If we want to turn our beliefs into actions, we need to turn our beliefs into actions. It is tautological if we were unified selves.
But the reason that the suggestion is not tautological is because our actions are actually controlled by different aspects of ourselves. And so what Aristotle is saying is if you want to turn your beliefs into actions, use your beliefs to set up the world in
in such a way that the actions you undertake accord with your beliefs. So my belief was my balance will be better if I stand on one foot. I was completely aware that I couldn't think my way into having good balance. I needed to do something with my body. So how did I turn that belief into action? I needed a trick for using my belief system to
to cause my body to practice the thing that it needed to practice. And so the trick was to find a two-minute segment during which I would remember to do the thing that I intended to do and that I wouldn't have reason not to do it. And it would be a short enough amount of time that I would have the self-control to do it.
So it's not tautological because you start by doing it self-consciously and you end up doing it automatically. So in some ways what you're saying is that a habit is a sort of tool for turning the things that we ought to do or that we want to do or we'd like to do into the things that we actually do do. That's exactly right. Habits are tools for turning oughts into is's.
But habits are indifferent between oughts and ought nots.
So I made a very nice habit that I like, which is that when I brush my teeth, I stand on one foot. But I also made a habit that I don't like very much, which is when I see my phone with a number next to any one of the little icons on it, I push on that icon to see what has caused that red circle with a number on it to appear. And I do that every...
But even when on reflection, I would rather be in a conversation with the person across the table from me. So it's just as easy to build a habit to do something that you would like to be doing as it is to build a habit to do something that you would not like to be doing. Each is easy to acquire. Each is hard to extinct. Hmm.
So to go back to the metaphor of the rider and the two horses that Plato gave us, you've said before that Aristotle's idea was that rather than instruct the rider, the idea here is to tame the horses. Aristotle's idea is exactly that you need to tame the horses. Imagine you're trying to tell your cat to stay off the couch.
You can't talk to your cat and say, I'm sorry, Tyroneus, whatever kind of name your cat has. You are not permitted on the couch. That doesn't work. You need to tell a cat what to do by associating certain kinds of actions with certain kinds of consequences. If you get on the couch, there will be a loud noise that you don't like.
Same with our inner selves. I can draw a parabolic design to tell you where a ball is going to come if you throw it towards my catcher's mitt. But talking to the charioteer, that is drawing me a parabola, is not helpful in training my hand to catch the ball and not helpful in training my face to pull itself out of the line of fire as the ball is coming towards it.
So Aristotle's point is, how do you train yourself to stand on one foot? You don't talk to your foot. You stand on one foot. How do you train your cat to stay off the couch? You don't talk to your cat. You make it unpleasant for your cat to be on the couch. How do you train yourself to catch a ball? You don't model the parabolic structure. You hold up your hand until it becomes instinctive. Look at the parabolic structure.
learning how to type, learning how to do anything routine and automatic is training Plato's horses. Tamar, you say that for Aristotle, another key to forming virtuous habits was the practice of moderation. What did he mean by this? So Aristotle thinks all virtues are moderate intermediates between two extremes. Take the example of bravery.
So to be brave is certainly not to be cowardly, but it's also not to be reckless. It's to be brave at the right time in the right way. Likewise, says Aristotle, to be generous is not to be selfish, but
But it's also not to be extravagant. To be generous is to give the right amount at the right time in the right way. Aristotle thinks this is true for every virtue.
So it's quite clear that with Socrates and Plato, they were echoes in modern psychology, modern thinking, modern literature. What are the echoes and resonances you're seeing in Aristotle's work in modern psychological science, modern brain science? The scientific insights that lie at the heart of the entire contemporary discussion of habit
are the scientific insights that lie at the heart of what Aristotle is saying. That is, what we practice is what we become.
Notice that that's not just true in the contemporary literature on habit, of which there are numerous examples. You cannot go to an airport without being confronted with a set of books about habits, seven habits of highly effective people, various books that are going to tell you how to get micro habits, macro habits.
But if you think about a second meaning of the word habit, it's a term that we use to describe the uniform that is worn by someone religious. And you might think that one of the great insights of religious traditions is to instill in us certain kinds of habits.
I was raised in the Jewish tradition. And one of the things that the Jewish tradition wants to instill in people is a habit of expressing gratitude.
And so it is a rule in Judaism. Whenever I am handed a piece of food, I recite a blessing that notes how it is that that food comes into being. That is, I need to stop for a minute and think, does it grow on a vine? Does it grow from the tree? Does it come from the earth? How does this food come about?
And it becomes habitual that every act of eating is associated with an act of gratitude. Medieval monasteries are structured in such a way that what you do is habitually built into the rhythm of your life.
The practice of wearing a wristband that says WWJD is to create in you a habit. At any moment where I'm trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, I should check, what would Jesus do? And I would say virtually everything that I say and do is shaped by my meta-awareness.
That the reasons that I seem to be doing something may not be the reasons that I'm actually doing it. That I am pulled in different directions and that I do what I find easy. So every day I am presented with multiple opportunities to realign anything from a tiny habit where I put my keys to a major habit.
How often do I talk to my kids on the phone so that it is part of the rhythm of my life? What happens when despite our best efforts to build our lives right, things don't break our way? When we are victims of unfairness, illness, or tragedy? Turns out, the ancients struggled with these conundrums too.
In our companion piece to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, Tamar Gendler explores what we should do when we are confronted by bad luck and also how we can change our luck. If you are already a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, you can listen to that episode now. It's titled, What Homer and Epictetus Can Teach Us Today. If you haven't subscribed as yet, you can check it out for free on a seven-day trial. To do so, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain on your phone.
Again, that's apple.co slash hiddenbrain. Your support helps us to build more episodes like this one and keeps the show thriving. Tamar, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. Tamar Gendler is a philosopher at Yale University and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
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