2023-09-25
36 分钟How well would you say you know yourself? Do you feel like the same person you were 10 years ago? Today’s guest, Shankar Vedantam, loves these kinds of questions and what they reveal about what we believe about ourselves and how we actually behave. Shankar is a science writer and the creator and host of the podcast “Hidden Brain”. In this episode, Shankar shares why he’s fascinated by the things we THINK we know, uncovers examples of what our brains hide from us, and shares how we can use that knowledge to live the lives we want to be living. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts.
Ted audio collective, you're listening to how to be a better human.
I'm your host, Chris Duffy.
Something that I've been thinking about a lot and talking about with friends recently is this feeling that I have that I'm not the same person that I used to be, but I'm not quite sure who I'm going to become, that I'm kind of in between versions of myself.
It's hard to put into words exactly what that feeling is, but I think a lot of us have this sense that so much has happened in the broader world over the past few years, and also internally, there's been all these changes and adaptations we've had to make.
And at least for myself, I just feel like I'm not the same as I used to be.
It's a hard thing to put into words exactly.
It's hard to articulate.
That's why I was so happy when I came across this talk by Shankar Vedantam, the journalist and host of hidden brain.
In his talk, he discusses exactly this feeling.
And as a metaphor and a jumping off point, he uses the ship of theseus, which is a famous thought experiment that asks whether, if you replace all the individual pieces of a ship, whether that is still the same vessel, or whether it's something else entirely.
Okay, here's a clip from Shankar's TED talk, where he's unpacking that question.
The people you were ten years ago are not the people you are today.
Biologically, you have become a different person.
But I believe something much more profound happens at a psychological level, because you could argue a ship is not just a collection of planks.
A body is not just a collection of cells.
It's the organization of the planks that makes the ship.
It's the organization of the cells that make the body.
If you preserve the organization, even if you swap planks in and out or cells in and out, you still have the ship, you still have the same body.
But at a psychological level, each new layer that's put down is not identical to the one that came before it.
The famous plasticity of the brain that we've all heard so much about means that on an ongoing basis, you are constantly becoming a new person.