This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
For generations across nations and cultures, parents and teachers have read Aesop's fable the ant and the grasshopper.
It teaches children the importance of hard work and delayed gratification.
It was a beautiful summer, and the grasshopper whiled away its time dancing and frolicking with his friends.
This is psychologist David Desteno.
While the ant went out to the fields and toiled to grow and to harvest food for the winter.
Why don't you stop working so hard and come play?
The grasshopper asked.
The ant replied, I can't.
I have to collect food for the winter.
You should too.
Otherwise you won't have anything to eat when it gets cold.
The grasshopper just laughed and kept playing.
When winter came, the poor grasshopper had nothing to eat and starve.
The ant, who had worked all summer, had a wonderful winter snug in his den and had ample food to live on.
Now the story has a harsh moral to it.
The ant who refuses to share comes across as mean spirited.
But the underlying message of the story is one we all wrestle with.
All of us have something of the ant inside us, and all of us have the grasshopper, too.