Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Milk Street Radio.
Sounds like I'm bragging and I am.
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Months ago, I was in the lobby of the Broad Institute in Cambridge.
That's where scientists affiliated with both Harvard and MIT do research, make discoveries and think about the future of our health.
Our podcast producer, Christine, and I were there to talk to a brain expert for this season.
Our interview with said brain expert was very insightful, and we will get to that.
But as we waited in the lobby to talk to this expert, something very Boston happened.
This woman approached me in the lobby.
Her name is Allison.
She's a scientist who does drug discovery for CDOT, which is the Center for the Development of Therapeutics at the Broad.
I haven't seen her in a decade, probably.
The reason I know her is that she's one of a few couples who met in the comments section of the Love Letters column.
She used to comment on the column under a literary-inspired name from my memory.
And then she notices this guy who's also commenting with really thoughtful stuff.
The two become friendly, commenting at and around each other.
And then they meet at a Love Letters event in person.
They had a lot in common.
And after that meeting, they fell in love, got married, and had kids because of love letters.
They did not name any of their children Meredith, but that's fine.
I was putting together like a little photo album.
It was like a gift of all 10 years.
And I put the first picture in.
I put the Boston Globe picture in because I'm like, okay.
And now we have two kids.
My son's almost nine and my daughter will be five or six.
It's crazy, right?
Success story, but like through the comments section.
Who meets in the comments section?
For the record, if you start commenting on the Love Letters column, I cannot promise you you'll find a spouse.
This was many years ago and under unique circumstances.
But still, it's a reminder that love can show up in the most unlikely places.
From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
So the day I ran into Alison, I was at the Broad Institute because my producer and I had been grappling with the question of our season.
Can people change?
I've been thinking about how we define change, the concept of becoming different than we are.
It can show up in all sorts of ways.
Maybe we want to change our own way of thinking, like perhaps we want to be a happier person while being single.
Or maybe we want someone else to change. like we hope a partner will deal with conflict better.
And maybe sometimes we just want things around us to change.
My assumption is that our brains are in charge of change.
It is literally the thing that controls what we're thinking and doing.
And because I don't know much about the brain at all, I decided we need to talk to someone who does.
So I called the Broad Institute to see if there was an expert who could talk to us.
The administrators there said I should come and talk to Dr. Steven Hyman.
They said he was the brain boss.
So on a random day, our producer Christine and I went to find him.
So why are we here today?
We are here because I don't actually know about the brain.
Well, I don't know about a lot of things, but when we talk about the question of change, like can relationships change?
Can people change?
There's actually like a scientific answer to that probably that goes beyond the philosophical.
Can we be better people and be better people? spouses or people dating.
And before we get into all the real nitty gritty of you know people proving that with their stories, I actually am curious to rewind a little bit and just figure out what our brains are capable of, because I don't know anything about my own mind.
We enter the building and wait in the lobby for Dr. Hyman.
Let me give you some of his resume so you can be impressed.
He's the director of the Broads Program in Brain Health, a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor.
He was a Harvard provost for a decade or so, and he even served as director of the U.S.
National Institute of Mental Health.
There's more, but I think that's enough.
He is smart with a capital S. You get it.
When we get to his office there's this big sprawling equation written on a whiteboard, like in Good Will Hunting.
This make sense to you?
This, yeah.
I like equations.
This is a place where we write on the walls and we feel good.
This is what it means to be a real scientist, I assume.
Equations on whiteboards.
But do you feel like you're like, oh, that's an equation.
I totally get what that means.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we have a lot of fonts here.
Okay, like that to me is like what I would write as a fake equation.
Yeah, no, but that one's not fake.
Okay.
Equation aside. we sit down and finally ask Dr. Hyman the big question, can people change?
His answer is complicated and it starts all the way back with fertilization.
This is gonna be a little bit of a story, right?
Because it depends on when in your life and under what circumstances and how powerful the stimuli are.
You're at fertilization, you get, you know two, Two copies of the human genome, each with its own flavors.
And it's very influential.
It is not by itself fate.
I mean, that's really very important.
Genes are highly, highly influential.
But they are read out in the context of your development in genetics, early childhood, and you know you're building your child brain right?
He explains that the changes we experience as we become a person are based mainly on synapses connecting wires, if you will.
According to Dr Hyman, you have the largest number at about 10 or 11 years old, but then your personal lived experience begins to whittle away at those synapses.
Basically, if you don't use it, you lose it.
To use the words of a famous neurophysiologist, Donald Hebb neurons that fire together, wire together.
And then, as you continue to grow, your brain begins to settle into its early adult form.
Beginning in, you know, late childhood, early adolescence, you begin to reorganize your brain into an adult brain.
This is a big change, right?
And in this reorganization, weak, unused synapses are removed.
They're eliminated.
This process goes on probably into your 20s, and then there are enormous changes between a child and an adult.
Now, you can see, of course, the self-actualization of this little person throughout life.
You give up your imaginary friends and you develop adult cognitive control the ability to control your behavior and moral emotion.
That's, by the way, why we have, Just empirically, that's why there's adult justice systems and juvenile justice systems.
What's important is, while these gates of plasticity are open, right while you are becoming an adult, while you're reorganizing your synapses and therefore your thought, your emotion, your behavioral control, that's also a time of maximum risk for mental illness.
The Gates of Plasticity.
I want to give a small trigger warning here and say that Dr Hyman and I are now going to get into information about mental illness, anorexia and eventually addiction.
If you need to bow out, I'll give you a beat.
Dr. Hyman says that most mental illnesses generally show up before or around the age of 18 or 20.
These are genetically influenced disorders that emerge when we are in a major brain change from childhood to adulthood.
Stephen Hyman explains that the journey into our more final adult state is a complicated time because things can go wrong.
Our brains are not as malleable as they were in our adolescence, but they also aren't yet done changing.
This time of plasticity is a great time also on the positive side of learning.
This is when you go in high school, you go out to college or graduate school and developmental achievements, potentially finding a life partner, maybe forming a family, getting a first job after college.
But there's two sides to this, right?
One is this great opportunity for development self-actualization, change in the context of your genes and the environment that you're in.
Right
But also then the risk of mental illness, something going wrong during this period.
And then after that, As we head into our mid-20s, things start to settle.
Our ability to change becomes less in many ways.
Once you are in your late 20s, early 30s, after synaptic reorganization and myelination, people tend to change, maybe in details, but not so much wholesale.
It just gets a lot harder.
Dr. Hyman is saying we have these natural moments of change in our lives as we grow up.
Then we're in our 30s.
And at some point we become like wet concrete that has dried.
That's my metaphor, not his.
He points out that we're also not necessarily in control of what changes happen, which we have to accept.
It seems like you're also talking about like what I'm thinking of is like little change, big change.
I'm leaning more left.
I'm leaning more left than I've given up.
I exercise more.
Yeah, I exercise more.
I've tried to give up ice cream.
I failed.
Yeah.
But like the big changes.
I don't know if it makes me feel better or worse to know we're not in control of it, because I think there's this and there's a message we get of, like you can change and you can be better or different.
I tell Stephen Hyman about Fumi from the first episode of the season.
If you haven't listened to our first two stories, go back and do it for context.
We'll talk about both of them today.
In episode one, Fumi told us that after she went through a trauma related to her mother's health, she developed this always present anxiety.
She turned into someone who was always waiting for something terrible to happen, even after months of her mom being better.
It was like her brain had been programmed, during those many months of her mom's illness, to be on call and on guard.
She was constantly in fight or flight mode, a very difficult place to be.
Then in her mid to late 20s She took a clown class and got good therapy and really practiced living more in the present and less in a state of worry.
And she says she changed.
I tell all of this to Stephen Hyman and ask, did she really change on a fundamental level?
And he says it's possible she did get rewired because she was young.
She was in this period of plasticity if she was in her 20s still.
I mean, different than if this happened when she was in her 50s.
I mean that's interesting because I thought oh, she's young to so many people are caring for a parent.
Later on,
She took a clown class and physical comedy, right?
Yes.
And so, in those moments, her brain had to truly be in that moment of falling down, making it like she couldn't.
And it felt like she had, in opting into an activity she was teaching herself to be present, to rewire again.
Do you think that was easier for her based on age or that actually doing something wildly different?
It's age and salience.
Okay.
He says not only was her rewiring possible because of her age, but also because of salience.
He'll explain when we return.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, back to my conversation with Broad Institute brain scientist Stephen Hyman.
Before the break, he was telling me about salience.
Stephen Hyman says salience is new information that matters.
That's the easiest way I can say it.
This can be good information or warning information.
Like a positive example might be, I tried something new.
I liked it.
It made me feel healthy.
I'll do that now.
I mean the more one is in.
You know Again, periods adolescence, early adulthood is a time when the gates of plasticity are open.
And if you're in a compelling, salient environment or you have certain mentors or certain peers, you can be influenced right.
So at 47, I could maybe take a clown class and have some effects, but it would be harder for me.
It would be harder.
This makes me think of our second episode of the season, which was about Kelly the, the woman who moved from Australia to Italy with her ex-husband.
Kelly herself didn't actually change that much, though not for lack of trying.
But she did experience this salience thing.
She altered her whole environment.
By moving to a place where she felt more at home and comfortable, she was able to finally feel happy.
Stephen Hyman wanted me to understand that salience and age aside, a lot of change is not up to us.
He says that for too long Society has sold us the lie that we can make improvements to things that we actually can't.
Things that are actually very hard to change.
He brings up GLP-1 drugs as evidence of this.
An example of a GLP-1 drug is Ozempic, which you've probably heard of.
It helps with diabetes and truly changes the chemistry of how people eat and how their bodies work.
From what I've seen,
Dr. Hyman says, let's let Ozempic teach us something about what's on us.
And what requires help?
We have long overvalued willpower.
Willpower doesn't get us very far, right?
People who diet or you know, tend to almost universally to regain the weight.
People who are addicted can eventually be treated, but there are often many, many relapses.
Somebody who's giving up smoking will have try all kinds of different nostrums and so forth.
And then we have these GLP-1 drugs, the Ozempics, the, you know, Wegovy.
And all of a sudden people can lose weight because this, let's say, imagine the set point of energy balance in the part of the brain that controls us, in the hypothalamus, has changed.
And then you have doctors saying with incredulity oh my god, it was biological after all.
And i want to say well, what did you think?
I want to admit here that i thought dr hyman would be a scientist who would tell me that our brains are a canvas and that if we exercise them, our powers are limitless, that if we want to be people who are open-minded or less intense or less needy or less worried, we can.
But what he's actually kind of saying is that after a certain age, specifically early 30s, we get set in our ways.
And some problems.
We can't do anything super structural without help in the form of a drug that resets us.
Hearing this might seem like a big bummer for a post-30-something like me.
Maybe better for all you listeners who are still in your plastic years, I'll call them.
But rather than think of this as a bad thing, I know that Dr Hyman's thoughts on all of this are actually encouraging.
They make me a little kinder to myself.
He says we're all so hard on ourselves about our inability to change our habits or ways of thinking that don't serve us well.
And what he's saying is we're not failing because it might not be a battle we can win.
It would take more help.
And in his opinion, we have barely scratched the surface on medication that can be helpful when it comes to mental illness.
A lot of people get some relief from antidepressants, he says, but a lot of these drugs aren't there yet.
That's his professional opinion.
Like he's saying we haven't found an ozempic for anxiety, let's say.
This is when he and I start talking about how medicine can rewire us and how sometimes that's just what we need to make change.
I tell him about a time that I maybe used brain medicine inappropriately.
It's relevant because, well, I wanted to figure out what happened to me that day.
I will admit this to you now.
Years ago, I had a an end of a book do.
And for the first time in my life, I took someone else's medication.
And then I was like, oh my God, this is what people were doing when I was in college.
People were taking each other's Adderall and it's amazing.
So I confessing here, I took the Adderall, best day of my life.
There was a I was scrolling and there was a picture on Instagram and I was like, oh my God, that picture of me is amazing.
And I looked closer and it was a picture of Reese Witherspoon.
I was out of my mind.
So you had a little too much.
Or just enough.
So what amphetamines like Adderall do is they, above all, they increase the salience.
What was boring now becomes prioritized and motivating.
So I was like, but one thing I noticed was, oh, that was a day I didn't have anxiety.
I felt like it was removed.
I go to my therapist, I admit that I did this, and I said to my therapist, what if I have ADHD?
I did not have ADHD, by the way.
Just anxiety I treated with a drug for something else.
I do think of that day so fondly.
I got so much done.
I also learned that salience is best in moderation.
So many letters I get. you know, and this is advice column stuff.
So people primarily like entertainment and crowdsourcing.
But people will say, oh well, things are in this relationship.
Will this person improve their behavior?
Will I improve my lens in terms of accepting it?
There's a lot of like, how happy am I supposed to be?
Also this, am I doing something wrong while dating and why isn't this working for me?
But I'm always like sort of thinking like Well, you know, if I get a letter from a 21 year old, that's like will my terrible, you know long term partner change?
I'm like, I don't know.
You're both 21, probably 100 times over.
But when they're 41, I might I do feel differently.
Like you kind of get what you get.
But like it seems like I'm like people want to know, is this good enough?
Is this OK enough?
Should I be satisfied with what I have?
Is this me or the other person?
And how do you navigate that if you don't, if you're sort of accepting that a lot of changes are being being satisfied or unsatisfied is another trait that we're not in control of.
I guess with cognitive psychotherapies, you can push yourself, not yourself one way or the other.
But, you know, I think it's important.
I'm not telling people to again to feel that they have.
They have no control, that they're not agents.
They shouldn't try to be happy.
I mean again, that's a recipe for despair and depression.
I'm talking about the difference between what you try to do in your regular life and then you hit a wall right, quitting smoking or getting out of a relationship.
And then you know if you get professional help.
A good professional isn't going to say try harder, right.
They have to work with you to find a solution that is realistic given the situations.
Some change goes deeper than we can reach.
And sometimes when our brain is stuck in one pattern, it can be very difficult to change on our own.
But smaller things, simpler changes, are possible.
This idea that even though at my age, let's say, there is less bandwidth for change probably less You can still change.
But when I go to see a new... I actually went to Chicago over the weekend for the first time, and I
Even just being somewhere new, I was like, oh, I thought different things.
I ate different things.
Fundamentally, I made no changes, but I... You enriched your life.
I enriched my life, and it made me... Feel better.
Kind of nicer.
I don't know.
I just feel like.
So it seems like part of this is that if we can even just have the will to put ourselves in situations that might involve growth or test ourselves, well you know, but that's the trap of depression, right?
Is that you don't right?
Uh, depression tries to turn you into a lump, instead of somebody who goes to chicago and uh has a italian beef sandwich or one of those.
And i did yeah, of course.
Yeah, that's why one goes now used to be deep dish pizza.
I did that too.
Positive change is possible in very simple ways.
I tried a good pizza and sandwich and I was reminded of new things and differences and that the world is big.
And I came home in a good mood and I was better to people at work and they were nicer to me because of it.
It was change all over.
Small changes, but important ones.
Stephen Hyman says that sometimes change is that.
We can do that, right?
Some version of Chicago or something that forces us to consider something different and positive.
That seems like it could be in our control, right?
Maybe listening to this season of the podcast will bring change through salience.
Maybe my interview with Stephen Hyman is helping me change right now.
He does want us to know that, for those having trouble making the positive change they need, the kind that's out of their control, there are people working on developing the right help for everything from depression to addiction.
There's so much work to be done, he says.
I think that's what they're all doing in this neighborhood.
Maybe it's why I like visiting.
That's why I'm a scientist.
That's why we do something.
We've got to do better.
We've got to do better.
So what do we take from all this?
Well, I can tell you some things I learned that are important to me.
Number one, our brains are more like silly putty in our 20s.
I realize that our 20s are a great time to really focus on mental health, self-care and positive change.
And of course, I know this can be a really difficult time to do that, because it's in our 20s that we're often building our lives, working our asses off maybe.
I know that's a lot.
That's another thing I take from this.
Older people, when younger people tell you they're upset, listen and talk to them and have empathy.
Their brains are plastic and we all want it to stick right.
Another thing, salience is big.
New information can change us.
I think this is how Kelly from episode two became Italian Kelly, a much happier version of herself than Australian Kelly, who was always dealing with discontent.
She lives in a palazzo now.
So my 40-something brain is going to focus on how to try new things and pull positive information from the experiences.
And I'm going to focus on being nice to myself about the ways in which I will always be the same, which is okay, because most of myself isn't so bad.
Dr Hyman is one expert who has thoughts about change, but we'll talk to more because, as we hear more stories, I think we'll need more perspectives about what change really means.
We'll hear a story that relates to all of this on our next episode.
See you then.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
Our producer is Christina Honitou.
Our executive producer is Kristen Nelson.
Uzair Ahmed does our audio mixing and mastering.
Sound design by Christina Honitou.
Maddie Mortell is our audience engagement manager.
Special thanks to Nancy Barnes and Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send any question about dating divorce marriage singlehood friendship, whatever to lovelettersatbostoncom.
You can also follow us on iHeart and rate us wherever you get your podcasts.
We love to know you're listening.
You know, be good to yourself.
Like yourself.
I mean, it's a...
It's a tough thing sometimes.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
