The Moments that Change Us

109.629 - 132.962 Shankar Vedantam

She's interested in how they inform and transform who we are. L.A. Paul, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Laurie, in the middle of the 18th century, there was a young man named John Newton in England. His life story captures one aspect of this idea that you've been studying for a while. I understand he had a rather difficult upbringing. He was seen as a difficult child.

134.222 - 147.25 L.A. Paul

Yes. And an important thing is that his mother died when he was very young. And I think this made him feel very unhappy and very alone, especially when his father remarried and basically sidelined John. Yeah.

148.519 - 160.42 Shankar Vedantam

So his mother was religious, but after she died, John soon found himself not just turning away from religion, but turning against it. He became what you might call a militant atheist. Was his father a source of support, Laurie?

161.548 - 190.552 L.A. Paul

No. Well, his father was distant and unemotional and was focused heavily on self-discipline. So I suppose this was his father's way of supporting him, but John did not find it helpful. In fact, it alienated him both from his father and from other people. And his character also then started to deteriorate. He behaved badly. He was arrested. He was rebellious. He was publicly flogged.

191.273 - 201.459 L.A. Paul

And he also, importantly, I think, had this kind of experience of despair where he blamed others and wasn't able to kind of take responsibility for who he was and how he was behaving.

1595.985 - 1612.381 Shankar Vedantam

Why do we think we can confidently make plans for our future selves, when in fact, we might have very different preferences, attitudes, and values in the future? Laurie says that you don't need dramatic moments of transformation to see how subjective experience can reshape our minds.

1613.182 - 1622.708 Shankar Vedantam

She cites a thought experiment, first proposed by the Australian philosopher Frank Cameron Jackson, about a brilliant scientist named Mary, who has a very odd upbringing.

1624.929 - 1640.989 L.A. Paul

In Jackson's thought experiment, the idea is that Mary grows up in a black and white environment. She's never been in anything other than a black and white space, and her skin is painted black. either black or white, whichever you prefer so that she doesn't have, she's never had any experience of color.

1641.73 - 1656.105 L.A. Paul

Now in Jackson's example, she's also a scientist who knows all of the science of color and the science of the brain so that she knows basically, you know, all the scientific facts about what seeing color involves.

1656.966 - 1677.441 L.A. Paul

And we can even add to it that maybe other people who know about color tell her about kind of, you know, well, color is like this and red, you know, red is like warm water and blue, you know, blue is like cold water and fire engines are painted red and that sort of thing. So she has all this information, but she's never left her black and white space.

2651.565 - 2669.262 L.A. Paul

Or you lose your faith entirely and then you become incredibly upset at being forced to kind of go to these places of worship and participate in this, what you regard as a farce now or something you just don't even care about. You have so little time left in the world that now you're forced to kind of spend it kind of engaging in these practices.

2669.322 - 2671.144 L.A. Paul

You can see how these sorts of changes would happen.

2672.184 - 2696.024 L.A. Paul

um other kinds of things happen like with respect to like there can be kind of catastrophic memory loss or a loss of agency in various ways and um and the problem is is that um when you're trying you can be told well this is a kind of change that's going to happen to you but until you're actually you know experiencing that change there are just dimensions of it that you can't predict and

2696.644 - 2704.208 L.A. Paul

The thought behind an advanced directive is that you're supposed to lay this out now or you're a rational individual and make rational choices for your future self who's unable to make those rational choices.

2704.828 - 2723.879 L.A. Paul

But if you're not able to actually rationally make those choices in the way that we described, because you don't know enough about the nature of that experience to assign it value in the right way or what you're going to care about in that context, because you're going to change as the result of having the kind of cognitive change or the cognitive degradation that happens. that's in store.