Meaning Lab

Ludwik Zamenhof was born in 1859 in a small city in Poland. His family was Jewish, and the area he grew up in also had factions of Germans, Russians, and Poles, all of whom mutually distrusted one another. During his childhood, Zamenhof developed a theory: these groups would never get along without a common, neutral language to communicate with people in the other groups. Zamenhof considered the possibility of using existing languages for this purpose—such as Latin and Greek—but decided that the cost to learn them was too high. So he invented his own. Esperanto, as Zamenhof’s language came to be known, sought to take familiar Indo-European root words and cast them in a language without verb conjugations, cases, gender, or any of the elements which make a language like German or Russian so difficult to learn. He was nineteen when he first unveiled the language to the public. Zamenhof’s goal was not just to create a language that was easy to learn, but to create a language that would put the different peoples of Europe on a footing of mutual disadvantage—and therefore, he hoped, equality. As far as invented languages go, Esperanto has enjoyed more success than most. You can study it on Duolingo. It’s a staple of popular culture; for example, I recently saw in an episode of the TV show Billions, where it is being learned by the character Michael Wagner. But mostly, this success has been on the linguistic front. People find the language interesting. But it hasn’t been especially useful as a basis for utopia. In a way, Zamenhof’s Esperanto is a microcosm of the system of values more generally known as “humanism.” There are many shades of humanism, but at their core lies a belief that understanding, connection, and even mutual admiration among different kinds of people is not only possible but paramount to a meaningful life. If we could all converse with one another, understand one another—then maybe we’d stand a chance of constructing the kind of society we all want to live in. But while Esperanto embodies the aspirations of humanism, it also is emblematic of its tensions. In theory, getting people to celebrate the many ways of being human is an ideal worth striving for. In practice, it is a difficult one to achieve. When it comes to the ways of being humans, what all humans have in common is that they prefer their own. The fundamental impulse of humanism is to grapple with this tension, and it is the subject of the latest book by author Sarah Bakewell. In it, she surveys 700 years of humanist thought—with each thinker bringing a personal perspective to the shared problem of what it means to value human life and society in an abstract sense. The experience of reading Bakewell’s book is to hear the echoing conversation of the ages. One of the ways of reading humanism is to see it as a means of participating in this conversation. It’s a notion I think is rather beautiful. Her book is Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope. It’s available now. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

The Person and the Situation is a book by social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, originally published in 1991. The argument made by Ross and Nisbett was that context matters. Human beings don’t behave in a vacuum, unaffected by the circumstances of society, history, and culture. The job of the social psychologist is to understand both the person and the situation. Without a proper appreciation of the larger context, it’s impossible to know what to make of any given observation about human behavior. But a limitation of the project set out by Ross and Nisbett is that social psychology has always had a limited ability to study “situations.” It is, after all, psychology—not anthropology. Psychologists tend not to study humans in their natural situations; they try to recreate paired down versions of them in the lab. It’s not the same thing. This is something Ross and Nisbett, I think, appreciated. Nisbett went on to publish a book called The Geography of Thought, about how people from the West think differently from people in Asia. But another way to approach this problem is not from the psychology side, at least not directly—to start not with the person, but the situation itself. This is what I like about really good travel writing. The job of a travel writer is similar to the job of the anthropologist. It is to go to a place and get a feel for what people are up to there. Then to come back and report to the rest of us what it is you observed. But the problem with ethnographies by anthropologists is that they’re usually not that fun to read, obsessed as they are with kinship structures and long-standing epistemological debates within their field. Good travel writing has the same incisive edge as an informal ethnography—and has the benefit of being much more engaging. Good travel writing is an exploration of the person via the situation. For my money, the best author doing this kind of travel writing today is Erika Fatland. Erika is the author of three travel books, including Sovietistan, about the post-Soviet states of central Asia; The Border, about the countries bordering Russia from North Korea and Mongolia to Finland and Norway; and High, about the countries of the Himalayas. She speaks six languages, including Russian, and is currently adding more. She also trained as a social anthropologist for her master’s degree, which probably goes a ways toward explaining where that incisive edge came from. Erika’s approach to travel writing incorporates her own travel experiences with deep readings of a country’s historical, cultural, and economic circumstances. More than other travel writers I’ve read, she relies on her conversations with people she meets in the places she goes—usually finding at least one common tongue between them—and uses these interview as a foundation for her own observations. In this conversation, we talk about the point of travel, Erika’s formative experiences and how she became a travel writer, her approach to writing, how her relationship with Russia has changed through the years, and some of her favorite (and least favorite) countries she’s visited. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Denis Dutton was a philosopher of art and media. He was born in the US but moved to New Zealand when he was 40, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. This interest led him to spend time in the village of Yentchenmangua on Papua New Guinea. Over the course of his ethnographic work, he began to get to know the locals. One day, Dutton noticed that his friends in the village seemed down. He asked why. They explained that the tourist numbers had dropped, and they were trying to figure out ways to get more people to visit. Dutton was asked if he had any ideas. He sort of shrugged, then off the cuff suggested fire-walking. The villagers had no idea what that was. Dutton explained. They asked him if he would teach them. Dutton had never done a fire-walk of his own before, but he understood the principle from his friends in New Zealand. Coal is a poor conductor of heat. So, in theory, one can scuttle across a bed of hot coals without getting burned if one moves with sufficient haste. The never day he gave it a shot. And it worked. The villagers soon adopted it as their own local ritual, even taking measures to jealously guard it from neighboring tribes. Dutton later asked them, “So what if some anthropologist visits your village in the future, inquiring about the origin of the fire-walking ritual? What are you going to say?” One of them responded: “We’ll say that we’ve always done it this way. Our fathers did it, and their fathers before them, and ultimately our ancestors learned how to do it from a white god.” This story is from Ritual, the recent book by Dimitris Xygalatas. And I think it illustrates something crucial about the way we’re used to thinking about rituals—that they’re a kind of cultural excess: there for arbitrary reasons, not serving any specific purpose. Aren’t all rituals like the one the villagers got from Dutton? At some point, someone just made them up, right? Rituals can seem antiquated, and us more-informed moderns are better off leaving them in the rearview mirror. But Dimitris’s work shows this isn’t the case. Rituals are useful for at least three separate reasons. In this conversation, we cover how research—including Dimitris’s own—shows that rituals reduce anxiety, are crucial for social cohesion, and are an important source of meaning. Unlike most behavior, rituals aren’t a means to an end. They aren’t about achieving a goal or desired outcome. We do them for their own sake—because that’s how things are done, how our forebears did them. And it is precisely this lack of immediate utility that makes them integral to meaning and identity. They separate our way of doing things from everyone else’s. And, as Dimitris argues, we’re probably worse off in the modern world for our willingness to shave off the trappings of life’s rituals in our relentless pursuit of increased efficiency. [This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.] So to start off with: What is a ritual? Why do they matter? If you ask 100 anthropologists, you might get 100 different definitions of ritual. As far as I’m concerned, a key aspect of ritual is that it’s either gold-demoted [that is, we don’t know why someone does it after it’s already happened] or it is causally-opaque. And what that means is that when people perform their rituals, even the most meaningful rituals, when you ask them why, very often they don’t have a ready explanation for you. They’ll say, “oh, well, we just do them.”* But even when they do offer some reason for doing those rituals—let’s say we perform this ritual for healing purposes—there is no causal connection between the actions undertaken and the purported outcome. So if I try to heal somebody by chanting, we don’t see any physical causality between the movements of my mouth and what’s going on in that person’s body. So that is a key characteristic of ritual. An additional characteristic is that rituals create special spaces and special events. They sort...

Recently, I’ve been workshopping an idea. Basically, I don’t believe there is such thing as an activity that is intrinsically meaningful. Sure, there are activities which people consistently endorse as meaningful pursuits: having kids, productive careers, learning a language, that sort of thing. And while there is an empirical fact about what sort of activities members of our culture consider meaningful, this is not because these activities are meaningful in some fundamental way. Rather, what this empirical fact captures is that there is a limited set of readily available cultural stories about where meaning comes from. We tend to say that’s where we, personally, derive meaning from, because that’s the default story about meaning our culture prescribes. In fact, anything that can be construed as meaningful—if you tell the story right. Most recently I argued this point in a piece called meaning is post-hoc, where my claim was that we can’t predict ahead of time what will be meaningful and what won’t. This is because stories are always told retrospectively—and meaning depends entirely on the stories we tell. In particular, I’m skeptical of the traditional psychological narrative about meaning (“here is the set of activities people tend to derive meaning from”) because whenever academics describe someone who is engaged in canonically meaningful activities, it sounds an awful lot like an abstract version of what a university professor does. I think that really underestimates the diversity of how people conceive of meaning and how devoted they are to finding it. Anthropology and sociology are full of examples along the lines of “Here’s some society that we think of as very different from elite western society and yet here they are spending all this time developing sophisticated theories about their place in the world.” One of my personal favorites is The Dignity of Working Men by Michèle Lamont. In short, I believe—at least at present—that there are no intrinsically meaningful activities because you can look back on any activity and come up with a way of construing it as meaningful. In this conversation, I had the privilege of honing this idea against one of the sharpest minds in the field. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Toronto, previously based at Yale. Between these institutions and his online course, he has taught introductory psychology to millions of bright young students. This course laid the foundation for his latest book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. Paul has thought a lot about the problem of meaning, both in this book and in his previous book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. We approach the topic via entry points from his latest book (particularly Freud), and eventually I get around to pitching him my latest ideas. By no means do I immediately bring him around to my view. A lot of what we disagree on, I think, depends on what goes beyond the purview of psychology and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the draw those lines. A conversation with Paul is always enlightening, and at least from my own perspective I think this conversation strikes a nice balance between drawing out some of the highlights of Paul’s broad base of thinking with some of the problems I’ve most directly been grappling with in my own thought. Paul’s latest book is Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. It’s available now. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

We pay a lot of attention to our romantic relationships. Whether it’s selecting a mate or maintaining one’s relationship with them. Apps make millions of dollars promising to streamline this process. Hundreds of books are published every year telling us how to do it better. And don’t get me wrong: long-term romantic partnerships are hard, no doubt. But that difficulty is not lost on us. Multiple industries are designed around giving us tools to help overcome it. It’s something we spend a lot of effort on trying to do better. But what about friendship? We also know it’s important, sure. But we don’t give friendships the same treatment as our romantic relationships. There are no holidays meant to carve out time to express appreciation toward our friends. A few books are written each year about Platonic friendship, but far fewer than those about romantic relationships. And yet friendship is one of the most important aspects of our lives. In some ways, it’s even more important than the handful of long-term romantic partners we’ll have in our lifetime. This, at least, is the claim made in a recent book by my guest today, Robin Dunbar. Robin is a legendary figure within social and evolutionary psychology. He is perhaps best known for the idea of Dunbar’s number: the number of stable, close relationships an individual can maintain is reliably right around 150. But from the broadest level, the major question of Robin’s work asks, “What do our circles of friendships look like? What should they look like?” The way that I’ve come to think about the core of Robin’s research is that we all face the same fundamental problem: limited resources. Specifically, limited time. Each of us has to choose how we’re going to allocate our limited time to work, family, hobbies, exercise, friendships, and all the other activities and pursuits which we’d like to do. Often when our temporal resources become scarce, the first thing to get cut are our friendships. Friendships don’t come with urgent deadlines. We know our friends—our true ones at least—will forgive us if we don’t see them as often as we’d like. After all, we’ve both got a lot going on. What all this adds up to is that the disintegration of friendships over the course of adult life feels all but inevitable. And yet—most of what is known scientifically about friendships is not generally discussed. For example, you have probably heard of Dunbar’s 150 figure. But that’s not the only important number. There are layers here. Essentially, Dunbar’s research shows there are concentric circles of friendships, beginning with your five most intimate friendships, then fifteen close friends, fifty good friends, 150 general friends, then 500 acquaintances, 1500 known names, and 5000 known faces. There’s a mountain of evidence showing that these numbers are consistent across cultures—even with the advent of social media. In other words, there’s a connection between the quantity of friends we have at any given level and the quality of relationship we should have with them. Maintaining this balancing act has huge consequences for us across all aspects of our well-being. Personally, I believe the acquisition and maintaining of friendships is one of the greatest challenges of adult life. It’s especially difficult in a post-pandemic world, where we’re less tied down to living in a single place and more free to work in other locations. The cost of this flexibility is increased loneliness. We find ourselves adrift from the usual social rhythms of life which we humans are used to. But unfortunately, the problem of solid friendships is one we spend almost no time trying to solve. Robin’s book is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. It’s out now. [This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.] In the beginning of your book, you present your thesis on why friendship matters. A lot of the evidence you marshal has to do with some...

One of the central themes of this show is the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. But in focusing on the egocentric stakes of storytelling, one of the things we overlook—I certainly do—is the importance of the stories we tell about others. We make sense of life in the terms of our own experience. We conceptualize the world in a way that corresponds to what we’ve seen and what we understand. This allows us to tell our own story in a pretty nuanced way. But it limits us in the kind of stories we can tell about others—particularly others who, for political or cultural or social reasons, might be very different from us. We put other people into a box: and not the box that would best fit them, but rather one of the ones we have lying around which we’ve previously used to make sense of our own world. This is a topic I’ve thought about a lot in my writing, my previous choice of podcast guests, and in my academic research—but what I love about my guest today is that she, more than anyone else I know, has actually lived it. Mónica Guzmán is a journalist and Director of Storytelling at Braver Angels, America’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to political depolarization. Her new book is I Never Thought of It That Way, in which she explores her own experience trying to connect people across political and social divides. In this conversation, Mónica and I cover so much: from the importance of stories in movies and TV, to our relationships with our families, to Mónica’s specific tactics for understanding others. But one of the things that stood out to me is this great line she gives later in the conversation about modern life being “tired, scared, and busy.” It reminded me of the famous characterization of pre-modern life by Thomas Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short. I think it speaks to something, it’s so easy to forget: Each of us is living out our own complicated human experience. There is no one who has everything figured out, no one who has reached the point of quiescence. It’s easy to see other people—particularly those with different beliefs from our own—as emblematic of some nefarious other way of life. But, when it comes down to it, there’s no simple way through existence. Everyone is dealing with their own struggle. We’re better off as human beings the more we can come to appreciate the process of that struggle, rather than judge its results. Mónica’s book is I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. It’s out now. Monica’s choices for three books that have most influenced her: * The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho * Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson * Midnight in Paris (the movie) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

I collect concise definitions of the good life. There’s something I really like about the idea of having a one sentence mission statement. It’s a kind of mantra to check in with from time to time to make sure you’re making decisions based on what really matters and not the more immediate, but also more fleeting, worries of the day. My personal favorite, which I recently referenced in a post on meaning and context, comes from the philosopher Bertrand Russell: “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” One of the things that I think makes for a useful good-life definition is that it puts the focus beyond oneself. One of my first Meaning Lab posts was about an idea which I called the Off-Policy Theory of Happiness, with the claim being that the most efficient way to become unhappy is to spend a lot of time really concerned with your own happiness. You need to aim at something else, something bigger. Your personal well-being—in terms of general satisfaction, at least; maybe joy, rather than happiness—will come as a by-product. And I think that element is present, perhaps in a subtle way, in the two-word definition of the good life given by my guest today. It is: “Find awe.” Dacher Keltner is a Professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has spanned questions about which emotions we have, why we have them, and what we do with them. His latest book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. And in the introduction to it, he proposes that awe might be at the center of a life well lived. At first, I thought this might be taking things a bit too far. I mean, awe: I could certainly see it as being an interesting target of psychological study, but as epicentral to the good life? Really? As I got further into Dacher’s argument, I realized there’s a lot more subtlety and a lot more complexity here than I initially gave it credit for. As Dacher argues in his book, and in this conversation, awe is so important because it is the emotional component of meaning. It is what we feel when we engage in meaningful behavior. That’s not to say that it’s the only thing we feel, or that there’s a one-to-one mapping. But they’re intrinsically related. Specifically awe is a recognition of one’s own smallness is the context of something much larger and more profound. As I argue in the meaning and context post referenced above, meaning can only be found by considering something—an activity, an experience, a pursuit, an object, a book, a word—in the appropriate context. It is a figure against a ground, and without proper recognition of that ground the meaning evaporates. The feeling of awe is an emotional signal that we’ve made that connection. I found a lot to consider in this conversation, because I tend to think about meaning not in terms of emotion but in terms of, well, thoughts. I think for anyone who is interested in meaning, there should also be an interest in Dacher’s argument about awe. Dacher’s new book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It’s out now. At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Dacher’s picks: * The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animalsby Charles Darwin (1872)Before Dacher Keltner, before Paul Ekman—there was Charlie Darwin. * The Wind Up Bird Chronicleby Haruki Murakami (1994)Given without explanation… but maybe Murakami needs no introduction? * The Invention of Natureby Andrea Wulf (2015)Alexander von Humboldt is an underrated figure in intellectual history. Just as Romanticism is an underrated period in intellectual history. (I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

For many of us, life is a process of minimizing uncertainty. We spend our days trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. Find the right career path, the right partner, buy a house, or at least find a sense of long-term settledness. Raise a family and put our kids on track to get into the right college, so they can start the process over again finding the right career, the right partner, and so on. The implicit idea in this is that there’s a point in life where we reach quiescence, where all the big problems are figured out. But here’s the thing. Life doesn’t work like that. Life is not a problem to solve. It cannot be terminally fixed. Something can always go wrong. There’s always the next thing. And so if you’re living your life, even tacitly, under the assumption that it’s possible to reach this point, you are operating according to the wrong model of the world. These are themes that I’ve long been grappling with in my own life, and they’re resonant in the work of my guest today, the author and philosopher John Kaag. Kaag is a professor of philosophy at U Mass Lowell, but he has that rare quality of someone who makes his living as academic philosopher: he lives his life as a classical philosopher. To him, ideas aren’t just for arguing about it. If you’re getting them right, they should tell you something—hopefully something important—about living. He’s a student of the work of William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henry David Thoreau. His books include American Philosophy: a love story, Hiking with Nietzsche, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life. A theme that runs through the work of these thinkers, and by extension John’s own, is how uncertainty is crucial to meaning-making. In a way, once something has become certain in our own life, it gets taken for granted. I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can readily identify this effect: whether in a complacent relationship, or in the pursuit of material comfort, or whatever it may be. Once it’s all shored up, it no longer seems something so worth striving after that you can build your life around it. It’s sort of like artificial intelligence. Whatever milestone AI successfully achieves, Gary Marcus will tell you that, well, that’s not what AI really is. I think there’s important in the idea that uncertainty is something to embrace, not just because it’s a fundamental and inescapable part of life. But because it can also itself be a source of great meaning. If that’s something you’re interested in being more closely in tune with, I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation. At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are John’s picks: * Waldenby Henry David Thoreau (1854)One American Transcendentalist’s attempt to wring meaning from everyday life. * Thus Spoke Zarathustraby Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)Nietzsche’s keystone… novel? meditation? confession? about an individual who is struggling to become who he is. * Man’s Search for Meaningby Viktor Frankl (1946)The most recommended book on this show. The classics are classic for a reason. * Existential Psychotherapy (Honorable mention)by Irvin Yalom (1980)The 700 page version of Man’s Search for Meaning. (Never heard of it myself, but it looks really good!) Books by John: * 2020: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life * 2018: Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are * 2016: American Philosophy: A Love Story (I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!) This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution. I produced about 90 episodes of Cognitive Revolution. Toward the end, I began to feel like I’d learned what I wanted to from that line of questioning. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with a podcast that represented the dimension of growth I would pursue in my next phase. But eventually I came up with Meaning Lab: a cognitive science perspective on the mechanisms of meaning in work, life, and relationships. I’ve done about ten Meaning Lab episodes now. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. But to mark my 100th podcast episode, I wanted to do a retrospective on what I learned interviewing scientists about the “personal side of their intellectual journey”—as I framed the tagline of the show. I got to talk to so many of my heroes. I got to talk to people who were great scientists, but not well known outside of their immediate discipline. I got to talk to people who were both accomplished scholars and well-known to a broader audience. I tried to talk to different people from different backgrounds, and to explore stories told by everyone from established tenured professors who came from academic families, to first gen college students from an array of backgrounds who more or less stumbled into research and found they were good at it. People were incredibly generous with their time. And I’m honored to have had the pleasure to talk with them and learn from their experience. Overall, what stands out to me is that there’s no one path to success. Not in academia. Not in writing. Not in making a living from ideas. Not in, as far as I can tell, any aspect of life. For everyone I talked to who said doing X worked for them, there was another person who said they got to where they are by doing not-X. Sure, there were trends and consistencies—and I try to get at some of them in the lessons below. But the overarching point is that you have to figure out what works for you. You can’t take a strategy from a successful person you look up to and apply it blindly. You’re a unique individual with your own strengths and weaknesses. Your success as a scholar depends, in large part, on learning to use them to your advantage. Another point was how just about every single person I talked to—especially the big-name scholars who seem to have everything all figured out—admitted to feelings of uncertainty early on in their career. The vast, vast majority went through significant patches of their journey where they weren’t sure if they were going to make it. But they stuck with it, and eventually they got to the other side. Personally, I identify with these kind of doubts more than I do the concept of “imposter syndrome.” To be honest, I don’t really care if I belong right now, right here, in this room. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Whatever. I’m more concerned about whether what I’m doing is going to end up being worthwhile in the long run. Am I continuing to grow and get better? I can survive being bad at something now, if I know I’ll be good at it later on. It meant a lot to know that when I’m feeling that burden of doubt, pretty much everyone I look up to felt some version of it when they were in my shoes. Thanks to everyone who took the time to come on my show. I learned something from every one of you. What follows are some of my favorite clips from scientists I talked to. It doesn’t include segments from...

For many of us, there are moments of realization we’ve had where we can’t look at our lives, or what we do in them, the same way ever again. I’ve had many. As a cognitive scientist, one of those moments came from the realization that cognitive science—and psychology, and neuroscience—don’t tell us anything about individual human lives. They tell us about humans on average. The problem is that no one lives a life on average; they live a specific one. We often hear about studies making claims like this is how people misjudge political opponents or this is how people respond to the suffering of others. Framed this way, it sounds like the scientists got people to line up, presented them with the task at hand, and they all more or less reacted to it in the way described by the headline. But that’s not the case. Not even close. Those “findings” are statistical averages. Either the participants did what’s being described a little bit—not so much that you’d notice it in the individual but you can find the slight trend among many people. Or a handful of the participants did what’s being described enough to drown out the effect of whatever everyone else is doing. Think of it this way: If I say people, on average, are going north, then one way to support that finding is to have 50% of people go northeast and 50% of people go northwest. On average, that’s what people are doing: going north. But it’s not representative of the behavior of any single individual. Another way to think about this is to ask who really takes the experience of individuals seriously: and the answer (the one I give, anyway) is novelists. Those are the people who are asking questions about what would happen if we follow the consequences of one particular person’s decisions really closely over the course of some significant portion of their life. Think about all the detail that’s included in even the simplest novel. In any given instance, a psychology or neuroscience experiment can only examine the smallest sliver of that. As a consequence, we’ve been taught to think of the brain, the mind, behavior, intelligence—all these things—as a kind of monolith. There’s the Platonic mind with an IQ of 500, and one day artificial intelligence will realize that kind of perfection. But in the meantime we’re stuck here living our lives as imperfect approximations of that ideal. As it turns out, that’s just not the case. And one of the ways we know that’s not the case is through the neuroscientific work of people like my guest today, Chantel Prat. Chantel is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She was one of the first guests I had on this podcast, and it remains one of my favorite episodes I’ve ever done. In that conversation, we talk about Chantel’s incredibly powerful story—with an unplanned pregnancy in grad school that changed her life for the better. The occasion for this episode is that she recently published a book, based on the work of her and her peers, called The Neuroscience of You. In it, she makes a really important argument. We’ve been taught to think of there being one canonical brain, one wiring diagram, one set of processes known as the human mind. But there’s not. Just like there’s not one human genome. While in aggregate we can look at commonalities across our species, each of us has a unique genetic fingerprint. The brain works in the same way. The big implication here is that all too often we look at our own behavior and wonder why we’re not more like someone else—why we can’t be as good, or as focused, or as kind, or as competent. It’s easy to overlook the simplest answer: we’re just different. Chantel’s work shows us that these differences are fundamental. Not in a way that’s unbridgeable and keeps us apart, but in a way that shows we have to appreciate others—and ourselves—for the specific things that make us us. Chantel’s book is The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain Is Different and How to Understand Yours. It’s out...

And a minor resolution about friendship. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

My guest today is Nick Chater, a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. Nick is an influential cognitive scientist with a wide-range of interests, which these days often tend toward public policy. But in 2018, he published a book, trying to draw some culminating insights from the disparate pieces of his own work in cognitive science as well as the field more broadly. He came to the conclusion that we have dramatically misunderstood important aspects about what the overall picture of the mind looks like. He called the book The Mind Is Flat. And by ‘we’ Nick means essentially... everyone. His argument is that the notion of the unconscious we’ve grown accustomed to over the last century or so is fundamentally flawed. We attribute all sorts of hidden ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ and other psychological motivations to the murky depths of the subconscious mind. But according to Chater, they aren’t really there. They’re fictions. There is no such thing as a ‘desire’ you don’t know about. According to Chater, what you see of the mind is what you get. It’s a strange argument. Particularly because pretty much every modern theory in psychology and cognitive science presupposes there is some sort of cognitive infrastructure supporting beliefs, goals, and intentions below the surface of conscious thought. So what evidence does he have there are no such things as hidden beliefs? It’s a good question. But another way to frame it is: what evidence do we have that makes us so confident that are minds are a kind of mental iceberg of which we can only see the very tip? That’s not to say that there’s no structure to the mind. But we’ve never seen a belief — how can we be so sure of what one would look like? I think there’s a certain story about the depths of the unconscious mind that we’ve started to take for granted. I think it’s worth taking some time to rethink that. Nick’s alternative is that the mind is continuously improvising, deploying behavior to maintain consistency with an on-going narrative. Instead of simple psychological causes (“She believed x and wanted y, so she did z”), we are acting in a way to stay ‘in-character’ within our own story. We are like fiction authors, not constructing behavior based on firm psychological truths, but rather seeking consistency, continuinity, and growth in the arc of our character’s development. According to Nick, to say that the rest of us are acting based on some engimatic psychological depths is no more true than to say a fictional character is doing so. The story is all there is. Here’s Nick’s alternative model, in his own words: An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible — to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by refering to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past. Nick introduces the concept of a mental tradition as the infrastructure of the mind. We get into it a little later on in our conversation. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he means by the term; but I like it. It takes a well-worn concept (“habit”) and articulates it with a fresh conceptual edge. At one point, I press Nick and ask him point blank whether he thinks habits exist. He says he doesn’t. I couldn’t tell you the exact difference between a habit and a mental tradition. But Nick’s position, as I’ve understood it, is that typically we believe we act according to ‘preferences’. I like coffee, so I get it first...

I believe when someone writes a perfect book, it deserves to sell a gazillion copies. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

One of my favorite psychology papers of all time is called “Telling More than We Can Know” by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson. The argument of the paper is that humans don’t actually know why they do what they do. But they’re more than happy to give you an explanation nonetheless. This the reason why we need a science of human behavior. If we could all just intuit the correct answers automatically, there’d be no need for researchers to figure them out. This provides a kind of template for how psychological research works: I got the human do something, and now I’m going to tell you why they did it. And cognitive science in particular is traditionally obsessed with explaining “why” in terms of one main concept: rationality. The human did the thing because it’s a reasonable thing to do, once you take into account all the right information. And if the story is not so straightforward, then the deviation from rationality cries out for explanation. It is an account of human behavior that prioritizes practical function: we have the mental apparatus we have because it helps us succeed in the situations we’re most likely to find ourselves. While this may be a useful explanation for behavior in the laboratory, things get more complicated once you start observing humans in the wild. What about all the stuff that isn’t explainable by mere rational utility? Why, for instance, do I prefer some clothes over others? Why do I have a little piece of leather on my keychain when it neither holds keys nor opens doors? Why did I listen to the Men in Blazers soccer podcast religiously for two years, then suddenly forsake it entirely? Why do I insist, simply our of principle, on never drinking French wine? In other words: what’s the “why” behind culture? This question is the impetus for the recent book by my guest today, W David Marx. David has lived in Japan for 19 years. His first book was Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. For most of his career he has followed and written about Japanese culture and its influence on the West. His latest book, Status and Culture, is his effort to explain the mechanisms of cultural change: why we do what we do, when we don’t need to do it. He calls this the “Grand Mystery of Culture”: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason? This is where status comes in. David argues that it’s the conceptual glue that holds together the parts of human behavior that aren’t explained by rationality. How exactly it does that is the subject of our conversation. But the thing about status is that you can always have more of it. If, as David argues, we’re all constantly chasing after status in one way or another, when does it stop? Is anyone ever satisfied with their status? Is the biggest fish in the pond happy? Or does she just want to find a bigger pond? Does status ever give us a sense of purpose or meaning? Or is it just empty calories? We get into a lot of this throughout the conversation. Yet, for me, reading David’s book raised as many questions as it answered. Status and Culture is an entry in the genre of Epic Theory. It seeks to explain everything. Doing so requires that one leaves out quite a bit, especially when the book weighs in at a svelte 275 pages of full text. But there’s something about David’s book which makes me really love it: It is an academic book that isn’t written by an academic. Reading it, one gets the feeling that the reader is hearing from someone who has actually been out there in the world and lived a little bit. David reads. (A lot.) But it doesn’t feel like he spends his days cooped up in a library. When he talks about culture, you know you’re hearing from someone who has participated in it—not just theorized about it. He’s not trying to explain why those other people over there are into one fashion trend and not another; he’s trying to explain the fashion trends which he’s seen in his own social...

Two competing theories of inspiration: the 9am-ers and the lions. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Language—who can use it, and how well—has been in the news recently. If you haven’t heard, a recent AI language model was released for public use. It’s a chatbot from the company OpenAI called ChatGPT. And its capabilities are, to use a technical term, astounding. It can draft essays at an advanced undergraduate level on just about any topic. It can write a scene for a movie script along any premise you specify. It can plan a set of meals for you this week, provide the recipes, compile a shopping list, and tell you how what you’re eating will affect your overall health and fitness goals. And in terms of grammar and sentence construction, it makes no mistakes. Literally none. This isn’t your grandmother’s chatbot. This episode is not about how ChatGPT works; it is about our current understanding of how language works. With advances in AI allowing us to create more sophisticated programs for using language, that understanding may change in the near future. But even with all the recent advances, the underlying logic behind how these kinds of programs work and what they can teach us about human language goes back decades in research on cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It seems like there’s something about ChatGPT that understands the words it’s using. The truth is we don’t know yet. It’s too soon to tell. What we do know is that we humans understand the words we use, and why we’re capable of doing that is one of the great and fantastic puzzles of our species. My guest today, Gary Lupyan, is one of my favorite sources of insights about that puzzle. Gary is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies language, particularly semantics, from a cognitive science perspective. This conversation is about Gary’s point of view on language, words, and how we use them to both construct an understanding of the world and convey it to those around us. It’s not necessarily about endorsing a big sweeping theory. But to put together some of the pieces of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may have misunderstood about language. For example, take the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the idea that language determines thought—that if you were to speak a language other than the one(s) already you do, it could potentially lead to an entirely different way of seeing the world. And really, the big picture of Sapir-Whorf has been settled. The truth, honestly, is not that exciting. Language does determine thought—but only a little, and not in any ways that can’t be worked around. As Gary describes it, language is a system of categories. The language we speak can orient us toward different delineations of those categories with the world. But no language prevents us from seeing or comprehending any category outright. What’s really fascinating here is not the broadest aspects of the overarching theory, but the implications for specific cases. There are versions of this that we touch on a lot throughout this conversation. But in terms of grand theories, a general theme emerged in our conversation of describing ideas about language on a spectrum: from Chomsky to Tomasello. Noam Chomsky you’ve probably heard of. He’s one of the most prolific scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of cognitive science, and to a large degree single-handedly determined the trajectory of linguistics for a period of almost thirty years. His most famous construction is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It’s a totally legitimate English sentence, but one that expresses an illegitimate concept. It is representative of Chomsky’s focus on structure: he didn’t care about whether or not anyone had ever used that sentence; he just cared that it was possible to do so. Michael Tomasello, on the other hand, takes a usage-based approach to language. Mike has been a guest on this show and is another cognitive scientist who has had a big impact on my own thinking. He believes the...

Why the metrics we use to evaluate decisions are not the ones we should use to make them. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Right now, over the course of the next couple weeks, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion people will tune in to the same event. This event is not a geopolitical one. Governmental regimes will not be decided based on its outcome. It is not an economic one. The winner will be financially compensated, but not in any way that will meaningfully affect the people of that country. National boundaries will not be redrawn as a result of this conflict. Ultimately, it comes down to twenty-two men, a ball, and who can put it put it in the opponents net the most times. It is the World Cup. I don’t say this as someone who thinks the World Cup isn’t important. I think it’s fantastically important, and I count down to it every four years starting approximately three days after the final match. But many people believe that because it’s a game, because it doesn’t have overt real-world implications, that the World Cup doesn’t matter. Some people believe that because it’s a certain kind of game—one in which Europeans are usually dominant, not Americans—that it doesn’t matter. But it does matter. And the reason it matters is that there’s no other event in the world that quite so many people from quite so many walks of life get worked up about. An election, a TV show, the publication of a book, a Nobel Prize—none of these things can compete with the sheer volume of interest generated by the World Cup. It may be a fiction. But it is one that a large proportion of the planet has bought into. I think this dynamic is useful to pay attention to because this is also the way games work more generally. The points aren’t real in any sense but the number on the scoreboard. Yet people live and die by whether their team’s number is bigger than their opponent’s. They dedicate a large portion of their leisure time to following the accumulation of these points. Arguably, these kind of games are what humanity, in aggregate, cares about most. This makes for a paradox of sorts. Even though they don’t have meaningful stakes outside the arena, games are designed to elicit concentrated doses of meaningful engagement. When you’re into a game, nothing feels like it matters quite as much as the outcome of that match. A defensible definition of a “game” is an event or set of actions which is fundamentally meaningless to which we have assigned meaning. More specifically, this is the process of gamification, and the downsides of gamification is the topic of a recent book by my guest today. Adrian Hon is a game developer, and CEO of gaming company Six to Start. Adrian’s best known game is Zombies, Run! an app which incites runners to move faster by overlaying a plot of apocalyptic escape on their movements in the real-world. It has been downloaded over ten million times. Adrian’s an expert on the power of gamification, and his book is all about taking a skeptical look at how gamification has infiltrated our lives. At the heart of Adrian’s observations is a tension. I think of it as the double-edged sword of gamification. By assigning points to vocab learning, or tracking the number of steps you’ve taken every day, gamification is able to take trivial, mundane actions, which we want to engage in but don’t find particularly appealing, and imbue them with meaning. This in turns gives us the motivation to accomplish those actions at a more efficient rate than we otherwise would. Where this goes wrong is when the game itself—the points system, the badges, the leaderboard—becomes more meaningful than the original reason for wanting to perform this action. When we care more about the fictional story in a way that starts taking away from the real things we actually care about, that’s when gamification becomes a problem. The thrust of Adrian’s book is that more and more companies are using the powerful techniques of gamification to get us to engage in their products far longer and in different ways than we might initially intend to. In other words, it’s commonplace...

In a way, coming to the end of one’s PhD almost feels inappropriate. The pursuit of this degree gives a kind of structure to adult life—my life, anyway—as something on the horizon to aim for but never actually reach. I’ve always known that getting this degree is not the final goal, just one milestone of many. But nevertheless finishing it doesn’t feel like something I’m supposed to do. It is, for me, an unprecedented situation. But nonetheless here we are. Last month, I defended my dissertation. And so now I’m in the somewhat startling position of having done what I set out to do. I find myself faced with a familiar question, but one whose answer feels a lot less straightforward than it used to be. Now what? The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution. People, I was surprised to learn, were incredibly generous with their time. The project didn’t always go as well as I hoped. There’s a lot that I could’ve done better, and the pandemic actually stifled my show when it seemed to bolster this kind of project for so many others. But I got to talk to many of my heroes, a lot of whom were the ones who inspired me to pursue cognitive science and social psychology in the first place. I started the project with the vague idea that it would be a useful exercise in “audience building.” It seemed like the kind of thing that was done by other authors who had taken a path like the one I envisioned for myself. It was clear to me since I was an undergrad that I cared at least as much about telling stories about research findings than actually doing the research itself. And I’ve always known that I wanted to write non-fiction pop-psych books as a part of my career. But I also knew that going directly into writing wasn’t the right move, either. I wanted to have something to say. And I felt that developing actual expertise in a field I cared about would give me that. The Cognitive Revolution podcast allowed me the opportunity to explore the different versions of what that can look like, and how different people have constructed something resembling a coherent career from the disparate pieces of whatever they’ve found, in retrospect, that they’d managed to accomplish. What I thought was going to a means of building an audience was more like adding a second major to my degree. I got a lot out of it. But it was only incidental whether anyone else did as well. Somewhere along the line, though, I began to feel I was reaching a point of diminishing returns on that project. It’s not that there was nothing left for me to learn. But it seemed like I had gotten all the information that I was going to get out of asking people how they went about doing whatever it was they did. I still am drawn to people’s personal stories, absolutely. But the original concept of Cognitive Revolution no longer represents the dimension of growth that I see myself moving along. It’s time to do something else. And so I’m starting a new project. It’s a podcast; it’s a blog. It’s the Substack you’re reading now. I call it Meaning Lab. In Meaning Lab, I’ll take a cognitive science perspective on the pursuit of meaning in work, life, and relationships. Each week, I’ll publish a podcast interview with an author, scientist, or academic about how their work has uncovered some interesting or unexpected aspect of meaning—where it comes from, how it works, what exactly it means to find more of it in one’s...

Anxiety. It is the only emotion my body believes is truly necessary for me to experience at three o’clock in the morning. To be sure I’d rather be sleeping. Usually how I respond to this experience is by listening to audiobooks or podcasts until I fall back asleep. I may get through more audiobooks that way, but it’s hard for me to look at that and imagine anxiety as anything other than a burden. I’ve recently been rethinking that relationship with anxiety. And in particular, one book has helped me start to change some of my beliefs about how anxiety works and what a healthy relationship to it might look like. That book is called Future Tense by my guest today, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. Tracy is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She’s spent the last couple decades as a psychologist studying anxiety, particularly in clinical populations and children. In her book, Tracy argues that though anxiety is unpleasant it actually plays a crucial role in our daily lives. What exactly is the benefit of anxiety? Well, here’s how I’d put it: The majority of our emotional lives is concerned with the present moment. Our brains are designed to get what we want right now, not to delay gratification until some unknown future date. The tension here is that while our emotions tend to orient us toward the moment, so much of our progress as individuals—as a civilization—depends on doing hard work now so our future selves or generations can enjoy its benefits. Anxiety is the emotional bridge between our present selves and our future outcomes. It is the emotion that makes us care about what rewards or punishments will receive in the future and motivates us to take action now, in order to put ourselves in the best position for success later on. Without that emotional bridge, it’s a lot easier to disregard what’s going to happen in the future. Anxiety is the only part of our present selves that has a true emotional investment in how our future selves will feel. With this in mind, the appropriate relationship to have with anxiety is not to eliminate it, but to channel it. Anxiety can be incredibly motivating. And at a certain level, it’s healthy. Throughout this conversation, we talk about the give and take of anxiety—but we also talk about how this fits into a larger conversation about how we’re so often taught in modern life that what we should do is eliminate bad things. We should take the presence of bad things as a negative signal. We should be able to remove inefficiency, unhappiness, and all sorts of negative outcomes and emotions from our lives. (In my essay on Heart of Darkness, I call refer to this as “Being loyal to the nightmare of your choosing.”) But this is based on false model, an inaccurate story about how life works and what it means to be human. This is the story of anxiety that we cover in this conversation. Engaging with it and not running from it is part of the larger story of what Tracy called the “hard work of being human.” Tracy’s book is “Future Tense: Why anxiety is good for you, even though it feels bad.” It is out now. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe