Changing Our Mental Maps | Hidden Brain

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

In February 2024, two German tourists visited Australia.

During one section of that trip in Queensland,

they turned off the main road on the advice of Google Maps.

They figured that the road up ahead was closed

because of a rising river, and the detour

would take them to their destination.

As one of them put it later, they trusted the map.

We decided to go to the local map because Maps knows

maybe more than we know.

The tourists told an Australian TV station and other media

that they took a dirt path known as the Languietrack.

At first, things looked fine.

Their off-road vehicle seemed up for the terrain.

But about 40 miles in, the four-wheel drive Nissan Navara

got bogged down.

Its wheels sank into the mud.

The Germans were stuck, and they found

they couldn't reach anyone for help.

Recognizing they were in serious trouble,

they decided to abandon their vehicle

and trek back in the direction they'd come.

I feel like in a movie, like in a bad movie,

we tried to build our shelter, but they didn't work really well.

So we slept like under the sky.

Rain poured down on them.

They had to watch out for pigs and snakes and crocodiles.

The 40-mile journey took several days.

The tourists made it back safely.

Rangers later helped them retrieve their vehicle,

but they had learned an important lesson.

A map that's wrong can sometimes be worse than no map at all.

In today's episode and in a companion story

on our subscription feed Hidden Brain Plus,

we explore the maps inside our own heads.

What happens when these maps, which we have constructed ourselves,

lead us astray?

Miss direction, mines, and maps.

This week on Hidden Brain.

It's human nature to make plans, to generate expectations,

to imagine how things will go.

But life often has other plans in store for us.

What happens then?

Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist

at the University of Toronto.

Over many years, he has studied how we plan for the future,

and what happens when our plans are derailed.

Norman Farb, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much, Shankar, it's really a pleasure to be here.

Norm, your maternal grandparents were born in Poland.

They were Jewish and they experienced

the horrors of the Holocaust.

After surviving the concentration camps,

they moved to Canada to start a new life.

They knew what they wanted for their daughter.

This is your mother Linda.

Tell me about the world your grandparents constructed for her.

Yeah, so they wanted things to be very safe.

Further children, as you might imagine,

there's literally no extended family.

They're the sole survivors of both their family trees.

For their daughter, they brought with them

the somewhat antiquated view that her job

was to be a really good girl growing up.

It'll be a help to her mother and then find someone

to marry and manage a household.

And I think she really internalized that

if she just was a good girl and married a nice man

and how to good household, then life would turn out just great

for her and she would be happy.

Linda's life didn't turn out the way her parents imagined.

She and Norm's father fought.

I remember growing up in a period where there would be calm,

but then also really stormy periods

where my parents are fighting a lot.

And ultimately, that led to their divorce

right around the time I left for university.

And by the time I was done, my undergraduate days,

my parents had completely split.

And my mother was living on her own.

This was a catastrophic change in the narrative

that she expected for herself.

Talk about that.

I mean, she was raised with the notion

that if she was a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother,

that was the responsibility she had.

And in turn, she would be looked after.

She would have security.

She would have stability.

And in some ways, she had done her part,

but life had not responded in the way that she thought it would.

Exactly.

So for her, there was this massive disruption

of the story she expected for herself

and for the way her life unfolded.

And she laps into a deep depression.

So she would tell me in these phone calls

that she felt like it was just unbelievable

that her life had turned out this way.

We would talk on average once a week

and go into these really deep soul searching conversations

where she tried to explain to me why she didn't deserve this,

that someone was supposed to take care of her

and what was going to happen to her now.

Often she'd be in tears.

So really emotionally, dysregulated and upset and sad.

And with that sadness, was this urge

to make sense of what had happened?

That she had done her best, but it wasn't good enough.

And it was unfair and just really unreasonable.

It was just so almost incomprehensible

that life had turned out this way.

Almost like an unwillingness to accept that she was now

single and living on her own and isolated.

So by this point, you had started to study psychology.

So you were learning about ideas about the mind and the brain.

And I'm wondering, did you try and share with her

the things that you were learning, the models

you were learning about human behavior?

I've been studying a lot of things

and existentialism and people negotiating their own meeting

in life on the philosophy side and I've been studying psychology

and about how people make meanings for themselves

and how much we construct our own narratives of our lives.

So I would try to reason with her and say, OK, these things

happen.

But can we see from a practical point of view

that the more time you spend rehearsing all of these hurts,

these slings and arrows from the past,

the more you end up suffering as though they are still happening.

And this is where these conversations take 30, 40, 50 minutes.

And there were times I really felt

at an intellectual level, she's following me.

My mother's a bright woman as well and would be able to say,

I see this, I see this.

Maybe I should stop focusing so much on what your father did.

And then there'd be a pause.

But you know what he did?

There's other time.

And so it was almost like it didn't really matter

if there was some sort of intellectual understanding.

This rupture of her model of the world

was so catastrophic that it had a gravity of itself

that just demanded her attention.

And if she wasn't effortfully thinking about something,

it would just suck her right back into this litany

of slits and hurts and wrongs.

And I'm wondering from your part,

it's difficult at any age to be handling a situation like this,

but at 20 it must have been especially difficult.

But did you feel, you know, I'm giving my mom good advice,

she really shouldn't listen to me.

It clearly does make sense to live in the present

and not in the past.

And were you frustrated in some ways

that she was not learning from you

or taking your advice?

Yeah, I think I moved from a position

of benevolent intentions and a conviction

that we're going to get through this together

and we're going to figure out how to pick up the pieces

to a sort of first frustration, that the way out

of this cell that you're in, like the door is open here,

there's a roomy quote, you know, the door to your cell is open.

Why don't you go through it?

And I remember just getting so frustrated

thinking like we've been here before,

we've gone through this reason.

You've recognized that what you're doing

is harmful to yourself in perpetuating your suffering.

And you agree that it would be better to do something else.

And then yet you persist.

And to this point, where I really started

to resent the interactions, and I just didn't want

to have this role anymore of being her counselor.

I'd put in my time and it just wasn't working

despite trying to be inventive and approach

to different angles.

And I remember if the phone ring on the weekend

at the time when she would normally call

starting to feel like this real negative feeling

in my body, like an aversion, a repulsion almost.

And at the same time being like, oh, what's happening now?

Like, I feel like my relationship with my mother,

my own mental health is being compromised

by being drawn into this rumination pattern over and over again.

And I remember just getting a little bit of a feeling

of being in a relationship with my mother

and my own mental health is being compromised

by being drawn into this rumination pattern over and over again.

I had come up with maps.

She had a map for how her life was going to turn out

and was really upset that the map did not seem

to conform with the reality of her life.

And you had a map of how you could help her

and how psychology could help her.

And when she did not follow that map,

you were getting frustrated.

In some ways, both of you had these maps

and were upset that real life was not conforming to them.

I think so.

At the time I would have said, you know,

it was all about her map being her holding onto her map.

But I did have this insight at one point that also

I was starting to fall into my own script, right?

And then I had a map of being the smart, you know,

helpful son who is going to help pull her out of her depression

and then I was going to fix her in some way.

And so there was, just as you said, actually two violations.

There's the violation of her narrative

of being cared for for the rest of her life

and her marriage continuing on happily ever after,

as idealistic as it was.

And then there was also this violation of, you know,

my efficacy as a good son who's going to help her

and pull her out of things through my sheer ingenuity.

And I realized that I too was running along a script.

And the results of me running through the script

of trying to play psychoanalyst of pushing her to change,

of pushing her to accept certain facts

was actually causing me to suffer.

And it probably also causing her to suffer

because then every, imagine every time you talk to someone,

you have to like grapple with, you know,

the hardest parts of your life

when you're being asked to confront it and change

and then you can't do it.

So both of us are actually suffering more,

not just as a product of her own expectations

or model of the world being violated,

but of me stubbornly clinging to my model

of being able to come and fix things.

And realizing that I had a part to play in what felt

like the degradation of our relationship

was really important insight for me at the time

because I was becoming convinced

that the way I was going about things

was doing more harm than good.

And at that point, I think it really became an opportunity

to think about practicing what I had been preaching.

So if my mother's not able to let go of her expectations

and update her model of the world to accept the reality

of this situation, maybe I could work on myself

and accept the reality of the situation.

It wasn't my job or my ability to fix her or save her.

And what would it be like to have a phone conversation

with her and just stop the whole process,

like break the script of trying to fix her?

And it was a more radical way of being with her

in the moment, which is like, you could be anyone today

and I'm gonna let you be anyone today.

And that means you might be fine today.

So we just call it and just really just listen

like how is she doing and not reward through emanation

or buy into the blame story,

but at the same time not engage in this kind of therapeutic

delving and more try to model what a healthy interaction

might be like, which is just telling her,

I love her, I care for her, telling her a bit about my day

directing attention back just to, you know,

are ongoing experience.

And I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like,

I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like,

I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like,

I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like,

I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like,

I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like,

It was fine.

We weren't rewarding attention into the story about the past,

but we weren't trying to prevent it.

And so we just started to get on with our lives together.

Yeah, to the point now where, yeah,

she'll have good days and bad days,

but we still talk quite frequently,

and it just feels like normal,

which is something I was desperately trying to achieve

and sort of ironically failing to do

when I was trying to play therapist.

The maps we use to navigate through life

are enormously useful.

Sometimes, however, they can lead us astray.

When we come back, the curious brain signs

of how our minds come up with maps

and what happens when reality tells us

that those maps are wrong.

You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

As we move through the world,

it's easy to imagine we are processing everything

that happens around us and then deciding how to respond.

But it turns out this would be incredibly complex

and time-consuming to do.

Our brains are designed to save energy, not wasted.

At the University of Toronto,

psychologist and neuroscientist Norman Farbe

studies how our brains efficiently navigate the world

by coming up with maps.

So, Norm, let's say I'm commuting to work every day.

I drive or I take public transport.

The first day I do this, it's novel.

The third day, it becomes familiar.

By the 10th day, it's a routine.

At a conceptual level, can you talk about what happens

in my mind as my commute goes from being new and strange

to familiar and commonplace?

Sure, one of the main things that our brains

have evolved to do, which is to take any sort of pattern

in our reality and automate that process.

So, yeah, that first time you're driving,

the problem you're trying to deal with is,

okay, I'm going somewhere new, where do I have to turn?

What's traffic like?

But once the group comes familiar and you're like,

oh, yeah, when I see the green bush over there,

it's getting time to slow down and turn right.

Before you know it, you're doing it without even thinking.

And of course, this is all not limited

just to physical navigation.

Your first day at work is nothing like your 264th day at work.

So, our maps are not just about physical terrain.

They're about what we do.

Yeah, the idea that the brain is trying to set up a model

of the world that lets it predict what's going to happen next

applies to all facets of life from figuring out how to speak

to someone who's a bit prickly at work

to the most abstract things even of, you know,

what should we think about?

What should we care about?

What is worth devoting our emotional energy and attention?

All of these decisions become automated over time

so that any leftover resources can be used

until with the unexpected.

Norman, other researchers, have identified a network in the brain

that is involved in this process.

It's called the default mode network.

At the risk of oversimplifying things,

the default mode network is the brain asking itself,

can I take what just happened and fit it into a pattern,

a model of the world?

Yeah, so the default mode network is the brain

that is involved in this process.

It's called the default mode network.

At the risk of oversimplifying things,

it's called the default mode network.

So the default mode network is a constellation of brain regions

that seem to be most active when we're not up to anything

in particular when we're given instructions to rest

and just do whatever comes natural for us.

So this is part of the term default.

It's what happens to us by default.

So we have the sense that the default mode network

is instantiating a habit in our brain.

So that has things become familiar in our predictions,

can mostly just cover what we need to do next.

We don't have to do a lot of conscious processing.

This is the brain network that becomes most active

to deal with the expected input output from the world.

So one way that the default mode network can get us in trouble

is when we start to feel like our map of the world

actually is the world.

Can you talk about that for a moment?

That in some ways we're doing things repetitively

after some time in some ways we build a model of what this thing is

because we don't have to do it effortfully each time.

But after some time the model comes to substitute for the world itself

for the thing that we're doing itself.

Can you talk about how that process happens?

Which is in some ways you're training the autopilot function on the plane,

so to say.

But after some time the autopilot just simply starts flying the plane

and we forget that actually there is a pilot available to fly the plane as well.

Yeah, I mean I think we have moments of this.

You know, we'll just sort of walk into a room and start doing something

and then realize it's not what we intended to do.

So we have glimpses that sometimes the autopilot takes over at a behavioral level.

But I think what we don't often realize is that our habits are not just habits of behavior.

They're also habits of perception.

So where should I look when I walk into a room?

Who should I pay attention to?

What sorts of things should I think about?

What sorts of plans should I consider?

And by extension, we're also filtering out many, many other possibilities.

So the default mode network is not just looking at habits in terms of,

you know, do I exercise or not or, you know, how often do I bathe?

But also really fundamental habits for what parts of our reality we interact with.

And these are the things that we have most deeply modeled.

We practice doing it over and over again.

We don't consider turning left on our way to work if we always turn right.

We don't wonder what is going on left of us because it's irrelevant.

We've learned that it's irrelevant.

And at a social level, we've learned that some topics are irrelevant.

They're not that important to us.

Some people are irrelevant.

They're not that important to us.

And even when we're talking to someone, we know and have some affiliation with

there are certain things we're used to discussing with them and other things that

they're just not the kind of person I would share that with.

Or this, I wouldn't make the conversation go in that way.

And that all comes from just how we perceive the world around us and filter

what matters and what doesn't matter in that context.

And the default mode network is doing that too.

So in a way, this greatly simplifies the problem of like,

what am I doing in every given moment?

But also the way it simplifies things is by creating massive blind spots

as to what are all the other things that are possible in this moment,

which has big implications for our ability to change.

I'm thinking about the story you told me about your mom.

She recognizes from time to time.

It might be better for me not to dwell on the past and not to have so much

animosity towards my ex-husband.

I should move forward with my life.

You sort of know these things at one level in your mind.

But at some level, your default is to spring back into this model that says,

here's the world that I was promised and the world didn't turn out that way.

And my mind keeps returning to that groove of feeling betrayed and let down.

Yeah, the idea of like a groove, right, or a channel that it's easier for our

thoughts to fill that way, I think is a really good metaphor.

We know that we have sort of mental habits that we would like to change.

So at the times that we're effortfully concentrating,

we're using our attention to choose differently.

We have this sense of agency, but our attention is a very fragile thing.

And as soon as we're no longer paying attention, we become distracted

or especially if we're stressed and fixated on something else,

then what's filling in all the background of what to do,

what to think about, what to recall, is the default mode network.

So I know I shouldn't think about this negative event because I'll become upset.

And just in the momentary instruction of like, well, this actually is in skillful right now,

has very little power compared to all of this machinery saying,

you should think about it more.

It's about you.

And we know from other research that thinking about the self gets the highest priority

over any kind of other thinking because those are the types of thoughts

that are by definition relevant for survival.

I mean, I'm imagining that if you're driving on a street, for example,

and now we see a red light, most of us are not going through the effortful process of saying,

all right, that's a traffic signal in front of me.

The light is turned red.

Red is supposed to mean that I'm supposed to slow down and stop,

so I should come to a stop because it's a red light.

All of that is happening automatically.

And really what you're saying is that the same thing happens at the level of interpersonal relations

for example, we have these defaults where we see people, we've had certain patterns

of conversations with them, and the default mode network in some ways is putting us

into the same mode that we are in when we see a red light and we automatically come to a stop.

Right. And it's not that there's zero awareness on a red light.

It's more like, let's shortcut through all the reasoning and just give you sort of a basic feeling

of like, you need to do this now.

And it might be dangerous or unpleasant not to.

And this is the default mode network trying to simplify things for us.

That comes with trade-offs because this network is almost like a feeling of certainty in our minds,

but the world itself is an unstable and changing place,

so it can make it very difficult for us to change if that learning is now being over-generalized.

Or even if it's like the same person, but let's say that person has changed or the situation has changed,

it's going to be hard for us to change that programming.

I mean, as you pointed out when you were talking to your mom,

it was easier in some ways to start with the default of saying, you know, she is in trouble,

she is depressed, I need to help her, she's in need of therapy.

As opposed to say, let's see where she is today.

Let's pay attention to what's actually going on today.

That's a much more effortful process of actually reading where things are,

rather than assuming you know where they are.

Yeah, so it's much more effortful to go in assuming you know nothing about a person

and be open to this flood of information and not knowing what to pay attention to

and not knowing who this person is and starting from beginning each time is a hugely effortful

and also kind of scary process.

There's a safety in knowing who people are and what they're up to and what they might say or do to you

and to entertain the possibility that anything could happen kind of makes you vulnerable.

And what if that means you could have to respond in different ways?

There might almost be a fearfulness in letting someone to show up totally differently

because we want to assume that we're going to be the same person tomorrow

and that other people are going to be consistent.

What if they're not?

So you've conducted a number of neuroimaging studies of people who have experienced

or are currently experiencing depression.

You put them in the FMRIS scanner in your lab so you can see what's going on in their brains.

In one study you put people in the in this brain scanner

and you asked them to watch very sad film clips.

What were these clips and what did you find?

Yeah, so in order to be a good prediction machine, the name of the game for the brain is to associate

whatever is happening in your momentary experience with other past events

so that you can contextualize and interpret those events.

And this is why we think we see the default node network activating,

lighting up in the scanner when people are exposed to sadness is they see something happening.

We show signs, themes of loss.

We show clips from Terms of Endearment and the mother saying goodbye to her kids

because she has terminal cancer, for instance.

And the brain is sort of saying, oh, okay, I'm getting this interpersonal interaction happening.

What's happening here?

Oh, a mother is sick and she's having to say goodbye to her kids

and we immediately relate that to our own experiences of loss,

of having to say goodbye to loved ones, of the fragility of life,

you know, our own severed relationships.

And this helps us go from just seeing like pixels moving around on a screen

to really feeling like a person in a story.

This is why we enjoy stories so much because they aren't just about the protagonist in the story.

They're about us.

And that's the default node network kind of filling in like, wow,

look at how richly this particular stimulus, this particular event or experience

is actually a candidate for many other experiences or a prototype of many other experiences

that have happened in our own lives.

It's a ubiquitous kind of response to try to think about, you know,

how can I make sense of this experience in terms of what I already know about myself in the world?

Now, you did find a difference between people who are prone to depression

and people who are not showing signs of depression,

but it wasn't in the default mode network, but in another region of the brain.

What did you find out?

Yes, so this really surprised us that the default mode network wasn't driving our prediction of who is depressed and who wasn't.

We thought, of course, you know, people are depressed or so sucked into their negative life stories

that this is causing depression and it just wasn't.

I had to sort of open up my own set of expectations, my map for what was going to happen

and say, okay, well, if I'm going to make something out of this study that tells us something about depression,

maybe I should look for what else is happening in the brain.

And when I started now looking at what parts of the brain were deactivating

or we actually saw less activity during sad films compared to neutral films,

we saw that it was the parts of our brain that represent what's happening in our bodies

that tend to be turning off.

So there's parts of the brain that we know across almost every person represents what's happening on the surface of your body.

And we know that there's parts of the brain that represent the internal feeling state of the body.

And it was these regions that were deactivating in response to the sad film clips.

And what really convinced me that there was a story here,

because this is not how I think even the general scientific community would think of depression,

vulnerability, it's still thought of as being the triggering of threat signals

that then trigger you into your defensive habits.

So what really convinced me that this was important was when we looked at what parts of the brain had activity that correlated with

or helped us predict whether someone was depressed or not,

it was this pattern of deactivation in body representation regions

that was significantly associated with whether people were depressed or not.

And it did not seem diagnostic to look at differences in how much people were activating the default mode network.

It just seemed that what might be pathological or harmful is doing this to the exclusion of continuing to process

and update yourself with information about how your body is feeling.

And when you say how the body is feeling, you mean everything from, you know, am I seeing color on my ears hearing sound?

What is the feeling of the carpet on my feet or the desk under my arm?

It's all of the feelings and sensations that are flooding into the brain.

You're saying that in people who had a propensity for depression, these areas were suppressed.

These signals were being suppressed.

Right, the most pronounced places that were associated with depression were specifically the regions for what am I feeling in my body right now?

So as you know, how do I feel lying here in the scanner?

My heart are cold right now.

Do I feel sensations like in my gut, does my heart ache?

My throat feel, you know, constricted.

And if we think about our strong emotional responses, you feel it a lot of times in your chest and your in and your gut.

And if this signal is being suppressed while you're thinking about your sadness, it's that kind of perfect storm that's actually associated with depression,

which poses its own sort of conceptual mysteries for us to understand, because it's not at all what we expected.

It's almost at that point, like you have a brain without a body.

Your brain is full of its own thoughts, its own activity, its own self-perception, but it's not paying attention to signals coming in from the body.

That's right.

In the case of depression vulnerability, what's happening is people are saying, well, I want to protect myself from these negative feelings.

I'm just going to feel bad or threatening or just icky.

And so I'm going to, just for now, I'm going to pause taking a new information just while my brain thinks about this model of me being sad.

And meanwhile, the default mode network is saying, I'm just going to keep thinking about all the reasons, you know, I should feel sad right now,

and I felt sad in the past and link all this information together until I get interrupted by new information.

So you have this kind of recipe for, you know, turning on the sadness machine and then locking all the doors for other visitors that might interrupt sadness.

So there's this ironic perpetuation of our sadness by conceptualizing it and cutting out the sensory aspects of it.

But the default mode network is not in the business of changing unless it has to integrate new information and now we're not letting it integrate new information.

To put this another way, the brain is doing two things.

It's taking in information and then using that information to improve its internal maps of the world.

People with a propensity for depression seem to stop taking in information, leaving the brain with only its own internal maps.

If those maps are filled with rumination about an unfair, unkind, unhappy world, that becomes the only world we can see.

Even if good things happen to us, even when we catch a break, our internal map continues to paint a picture of glue.

When we come back, how to update our internal maps? You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto.

With Zindel Siegel, he's the author of Better in Every Sense, how the new science or sensation can help you reclaim your life.

Pop psychology talks a lot about the differences between the left brain and the right brain.

But Norm says the more important distinction might be between the front of the brain and the back of the brain.

The front of the brain is where a lot of our map making happens.

The back of the brain is mostly where the brain picks up information from our senses.

Among people with a propensity for depression, Norm says the map making part of the brain is very active,

while the part that processes sensory information is shut down.

The more stress would become, the more we start seeing that the front of the brain becomes active,

and many parts of the back of our brain are becoming deactivated.

I think you can think of it as a tale of two partners that are trying to work together to help get you through life.

One of these partners is the default mode network.

It really uses a lot of the mental machinery that makes us more evolved thinking beings in the front of the brain.

Its job is to make a really good model of the world and help us use that model to efficiently get through life.

But this other partner is the sensory parts of our brain that are just still open to the fact that the world is changing.

It's almost like this force of chaos.

We need to have chaos because the world is changing.

Our models are going invariably to be wrong if they do not adapt to change.

What seems to be happening when people become stressed or you feel like you're stuck in a rut or you wonder why you keep doing the same things or having the same interactions play out the same way,

it seems to be the case that the part of our brain, which you think is driven by default mode network activity, has become too dominant.

It's happening at the expense of the sometimes scary process of letting the chaos of the world that could change our models of the world, which also means changing us.

At the same time, I think this might explain now why someone who has a certain map of the world is sort of finds themselves not able to extricate themselves from it.

Part of the problem might be that they simply have stopped taking an information that could tell them that the map is wrong.

If your response to a stressor is to think, I don't have a lot of time to learn something new right now.

I have to deal with the situation.

What do I already have in my toolbox to deal with this sort of situation?

Someone is being aggressive towards me or I've just experienced a failure and I'm worried about what the future holds.

We're driven to use what we already know.

But if the problem is that what we already know is leading us to repeatedly get into conflict or to run into failure or to descend into the pits of despair, then we just keep reaching in to the toolbox that are the same tools that are causing the problem in the first place.

I'm also imagining, let's say you have a fight with someone who is close to you and the fight is very painful and you're flooded with all kinds of sensations, your cortisol levels are elevated.

There's a lot of signals coming in from your body that in fact, you have something very unpleasant has happened and now your default mode network kicks in.

You're telling yourself a story about how this fight came to be and what your relationship is like with this other person.

You have now the elaboration of the map. You have a map of the fight in addition to the fight.

I think what you're saying is that two hours after the fight is over, the body has stopped sending you signals that a terrible fight has happened.

The body has gone back to baseline, but the story of the fight, the map of the fight continues in our heads.

For some people that map become so powerful that the fight now persists and now it has a life that basically is lasting a week, a year, a decade, when the bodily sensations of that fight in fact have dissipated in a couple of hours.

That's exactly right. The insidious thing is that because you're telling this story even after the body has calmed down, your body doesn't know the difference between you telling the story about the fight or the fight.

It thinks the fight is happening again. You do actually get more cortisol and more stress hormones released into the body as you hold on to this over and over again.

It makes sense that we want to get away from feeling bad. We want to move things into a conceptual realm where we can manipulate them and think about it in terms of a story and it's less energy intensive and all these things.

It makes sense that we do this. Before we know it, exactly as you said, now we have this model of the fight that we can carry with us wherever we go.

That's what happens in real life. Someone says something at work and then your body comes down but then driving home, you think about it again in the body reacts.

You go home and you tell your loved one about it and so now it's happened again. Then you call your friend and you say, do you know what this person said to me and it happens again and again and again.

We are like inflicting the fight over and over again even though it was only like two or three minutes of our day.

I'm thinking about this story that is ascribed to Buddha and Buddhism. This is a story of something that's called the second arrow.

The Buddha, as the Buddha, has said as we go through life, we are going to be struck with arrows. Unfortunate things are going to happen to us. Tragedies are going to strike us.

But what we shouldn't do is we shouldn't take a second arrow and plunge it into the sight of the first injury.

Really, what you've just described, you have the fight at work but then you're reliving that fight now 20 times and each of those 20 times you're plunging a new arrow into the sight of the old wound.

I think there's a really nice parallel arrow. It's the stories we tell ourselves about the negative events that are like the second arrow is potentially if the stories we tell are negative or disempowering.

And of course, we learn what stories to tell to interpret events very early on in life through the modeling of the people around us.

The norm says that being disconnected from our senses can keep us from feeling connected to other people.

The more we live inside the world of our internal maps and the less we pay attention to how our interactions with others make us feel, the less happy we are going to be.

And it's kind of catastrophic because we know that our reasoning is never able to take everything into account and there's times we can have perfect reasons for our actions and be doing drastic harm to our sense of relatedness or connectedness.

So we're not taught to balance this sort of reasoning with, well, what does it feel like while you're being right? What does it feel like while you're showing that your model is the correct model?

And I guess there's a trying to say the signal that things need to change is often a sensory signal is this feeling that there is something amazing and great about feeling connected to other people, for instance.

And to feel that rupture and realize that something's wrong no matter how right you are like symbolically and logically, that's a really powerful motivator to put down your model for a little bit and think about like, what am I assuming here?

You think about so many, both interpersonal disagreements as well as partisan disagreements that we have. So much of that is about my map versus your map as opposed to asking, how does this affect the relationship between me and you?

Yeah, I really think, I mean, many of us want to can only think and I can say, definitely what I want is to feel connected and loved and accepted by other people and that's a real feeling, right?

And the times that I am most satisfied with my life, I feel like I have that connection and it's able to be there reliably and the times that I've felt at my lowest is when I feel like alone.

And to be too melodramatic like chunker, we just met, but I can feel a connection right now as we speak and that's motivating me to open up more and share more and it's meaningful.

And I just feel like we don't even have a great vocabulary for that. We're not taught that to the same extent. We're taught, you know, math or spelling.

And we don't have a culture that checks in on that feeling of connection or disconnection as being as important as maybe some of our outward indicators of health and success.

I really think it's this felt sense of connection both to ourselves in the world, but by extension to other people to other living beings that that's often missing when people feel like life has gone a rise somehow.

The solution norm says is to deliberately and consistently reconnect with the world of the senses, to feel, to hear, to see.

The more attentive we are of our bodies, the less likely we are to get trapped inside our internal outdated maps.

Norm says he has embraced a tactile practice each morning to help him be present with his family instead of letting the models inside his head tell him how to behave.

And the printing when I'm tired and grumpy, I needed something that would just break right through and remind me that I had some intentions about how I want to be in the world.

So what I learned to do is associate the feeling of cold tiles on my bathroom floor, it touching my feet with a reminder that I can be intentional about my relationships.

And I've used that especially in times I felt really like calcified in my relationships if I'm stuck in a pattern where I'm getting you know into quarrels with my kids, for instance, then I would use touching those tiles in the morning as a way to remember like today's a new day.

It's a chance to look at things differently like can you stay open right now?

I understand that there was a morning recently when you and your kids were running behind schedule and you felt yourself getting increasingly angry this had happened before and your mental maps were saying you know they never listen to me were always running late.

Describe what was happening in your mind and what you did at that point, Norm.

Yeah, so I pride myself on being an engaged parent and I want my kids to learn about punctuality and have a model that like I should be able to get them to school on time.

And I would find that you know the harder I pushed them to get ready the more they would kind of flop around and be playful and you know, bicker with each other and I would just be losing my mind like I feel like this rage building up this frustration of like why won't you do this basic thing for me like don't you even care about me at the same time I have like a matter age but like but I'm studying mindfulness and I'm supposed to be open to these things and just like let the feeling go.

And so I notice like okay, I'm just going to notice my rage and then like three seconds later to be like get your like freaking shoes on right like so just like attending to the rage and being open to the feeling of anger actually wasn't just going to take care of this problem what I needed to do was actually be more exploratory.

And I remember like looking at my kids and being like they don't care about getting to school on time they just want to play and I was like what's it like to like feel like you want to play and feeling this kind of warmth and like this sparkle again of like instead of rejection of them like sort of othering them as like people who are worth throwing my plans like feeling like well I want to be connected to them I want to play too but we also have to get to school and then realizing like well then really what I just need to do is get them out the door.

And then I remember with this kind of feeling of connection and playfulness like how could I do that I bet you have like a big scary monster showed up and was threatening to tickle them.

They would be really motivated to get out the door but it wouldn't be like angry dad time.

So I felt the anger but I also felt this like connection to my kids and I learned to become this kind of tickle monster when they were kind of messing around getting out the door and eventually they started to be like oh he's turning to the tickle monster get your shoes on really quick because you're going to get tickles.

And it was like a totally different way around the problem that wasn't about you know being stricter having more consequences or lecturing them about responsibility or other things that little kids just don't care about and are actually you know connection disrupting.

So yeah foraging isn't as simple as just like if you get into sensation all your problems are solved it's the beginning of starting to explore right and then remembering like what are you actually exploring for here like are you willing to be surprised that the way to get this kind of connection the way to have this.

Feeling of positivity it's not it's not the way you expected it to look but it's probably available if you're willing to to let go of what you know in childhood things.

Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto with Zindel Siegel he's the author of Better in Every Sense how the new science of sensation can help you reclaim your life.

In our companion story on Hidden Brain Plus we look at a series of techniques to put us in closer touch with our senses we will look at how to combat four beers and how to deal with recurring pain if you're a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus that episode should be available in your feed right now it's title making sense.

If you're not yet a subscriber you can sign up for a free seven day trial at apple.co slash Hidden Brain or through our Patreon membership page at support.hiddenbrain.org.

Norm thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much for having me it's been wonderful to get to share these ideas.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury.

Tara Boyle is our executive producer I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

We end today with a story from our sister show My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by Discover.

Our story comes from Jesuit Priest Jim Martin.

In 2000 Jim's father was diagnosed with lung cancer. One of the people he will never forget from that time was a nun named Janus Farnam.

Janus was one of Jim's professors in theology school and had become a family friend. She had a special fondness for Jim's father.

And right before he died Janus said to me, I'd like to come visit him. Now she lived in Boston and you know she's on a Catholic sisters budget right they take a vow of poverty.

And Janus got on a train took the train down five hours to Philadelphia took another commuter train.

Found her right to the hospital. Spent time with my dad got back on the train and went back home.

And I thought it was one of the nicest things that anyone has ever done for me. And I said, you know, I can't believe you didn't she said, of course, you know, why wouldn't I want to come down and see your dad.

So this just really gracious, generous gesture of love.

And the fact that a Catholic sister would come down and visit my dad was a big deal for him. Sorry moving.

And I think it prepared him for, you know, his his death he died. I think a week or two later.

So I think it's a reminder that, you know, someone said 99% of life is showing up and that these gestures that we make really stick with people.

You know, one of my rules now in life is when it comes to funerals or weddings or baptisms or certainly visiting people in the hospital or anything like that.

If I can go, I will go. Right if I'm able to go, I find there, I will go. And never underestimate that what we call the Jesuits Ministry of Presence just showing up.

Jim Martin is a Jesuit priest. He lives in New York City. His un-San Quiro, Janice Farnam, is a retired professor of church history.

This segment of my un-San Quiro was brought to you by Discover. Discover believes everyone deserves to feel special and celebrates those who exhibit the spirit in their communities.

I'm a longstanding card member myself. Learn more at Discover.com slash credit card.

For more hidden brain, be sure to check out our free newsletter. In every issue, we bring you the latest research on human behavior.

Plus, we always include a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can sign up at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's N-E-W-S dot hiddenbrain.org.

I'm Shankar Vedantim. See you soon.

[The Maps in Our Heads: Navigating Life’s Unexpected Detours]-[Changing Our Mental Maps]

📋 Summary

The Illusion of the Map

The Failure of Expectations

The Default Mode Network (DMN)

The Body-Brain Disconnect

Reclaiming Life Through Sensation

Conclusion: The Ministry of Presence

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Maps in Our Heads: Navigating Life’s Unexpected Detours]-[Changing Our Mental Maps]

📋 Summary

The Illusion of the Map

The Failure of Expectations

The Default Mode Network (DMN)

The Body-Brain Disconnect

Reclaiming Life Through Sensation

Conclusion: The Ministry of Presence

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning