"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." It's been 45 years since John Lennon sang that line, yet it's an idea that continues to speak to an uncomfortable truth. While we all like to think we have some measure of control over how our lives will unfold, our plans are often upended by unknown events and curveballs we couldn't have predicted. This week, we conclude our Wellness 2.0 series by talking with political scientist Brian Klaas. He studies how we respond to the random events that shape our lives, and how we can turn them to our advantage.If you enjoy this episode, be sure to check out "Wellness 2.0: Engineering Luck," our companion conversation with Brian Klass for Hidden Brain+ subscribers. We'll talk about the unexpected benefits of embracing the role of randomness and chance in our lives. If you're not yet a member of Hidden Brain+, this is a particularly good time to give our podcast subscription a try. We’re extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January and you’ll get 30 free days to try it out. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts, just go to the Hidden Brain show page and click "try free." Or you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain and click "try free.” Thanks for listening and supporting the show — we really appreciate it.
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the summer of 2022, a man named Ivan went on a vacation with two friends to Kassandra, a peninsula in Greece. During the holiday, Ivan was swimming in the ocean when a fierce riptide pulled him away from the beach. His friends alerted the Coast Guard, but he was swept out so quickly that the search operation failed to find him.
For hour after hour, Ivan struggled to stay afloat. The currents carried him farther and farther from land. Eventually, he was treading water about 15 nautical miles from the beach. It was cold. Soon, it was dark. Ivan fought to keep his head above water. The night wore on. His strength began to give out.
Just as he was about to drown, the first rays of the morning sun illuminated an object bobbing nearby. It was a ball. With his last ounce of strength, Ivan swam to it. He clung to the partly deflated ball, and it helped him keep his head above water. Hours later, he was found and pulled to safety.
When news of the rescue was broadcast on the news, it caught the eye of a woman in a different part of Greece. Ten days earlier, her children had been playing with a ball on a distant beach. One of them kicked the ball a bit too hard in the direction of the ocean, and it bobbed away. The boy shrugged and went on playing without their toy. Watching the news, the boy's mother recognized the ball.
It was the one that her sons had lost. It had floated some 80 miles on the ocean, just in time to save Ivan's life. Going about our day-to-day lives, most of us act as if the world is orderly and predictable. We make plans, we set goals, we schedule events. What we don't take into account is the ever-present role of chance and randomness, blind forces that wield more power than we recognize.
This week on Hidden Brain, we conclude our Wellness 2.0 series with a look at how we can come to grips with the unpredictable forces that shape our world and turn them to our advantage. We hear a lot these days about separating the signal from the noise. The idea is that there's a deep order, a solid predictability we can count on if only we can screen out distracting details, meaningless static.
But what if those trivial, random factors actually matter? What if they matter a lot? At University College London, political scientist Brian Kloss studies these hidden forces. Brian Kloss, welcome to Hidden Brain. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian, there's a story you like to tell about a young American couple, Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson, who visited Japan almost a century ago.
Who were they and what were they doing in that country?
Yeah. So there's this couple, this American couple that goes on this sightseeing mission to Kyoto, Japan in 1926 in the autumn. And they do what everybody does when they go on vacation. They sort of see the city. They stay at this place called the Miyako Hotel. And Stimson records in his diary that they have a, quote, beautiful day of sightseeing.
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