This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In all our lives, there are moments when the ground starts to shake beneath us, when our world becomes destabilized and everything changes.
These moments can feel disorienting, upsetting, but they can also allow us to see things in new ways.
Over the past year, all of us have had our own ground shaking moments.
What can we do all these months into the Covid-19 pandemic?
To reframe our challenges, to use disruption as a source of reinvention.
Every August we bring you a series called you 2.0.
It's about approaching the chaos of our lives with wisdom.
Over the next month, we look at how to cultivate more empathy in our intimate relationships.
So your spouse is late, your spouse does something inconsiderate.
You have a lot of control over how that behavior affects you, how to reinterpret the past by understanding the nature of memory.
The question is, which reconstructed memories are more accurate and can you learn to monitor that process?
And I think people can.
And how to grow from our mistakes.
Regret is actually a very hopeful emotion.
It's something that is helping us learn from our mistakes and do better in the future.
Today we begin our series with a simple but essential ingredient in life that we all crave.
Purpose is an ancient concept.
We as a species have been grappling with this concept forever.