Giving Up

- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge". I'm Anne Strainchamps. When was the last time you gave up on something or gave something up? Maybe something big like a job or small like dinner.

- [Angelo] Can you tell me about the first time that you had fasted and what that experience was like?

- [John] So, I was a young man. It was a lifetime ago. I'm a New York City Jew and I grew up with the concept of Yom Kippur. And among Jews, you're not supposed to eat from sun up to sundown and you think about your sins over the past year. It's a big deal. And that's just one day.

- [Anne] Producer Angelo Bautista track down John Oakes, author of "The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without".

- [John] It would've been the early 1990s. My partner then and now, she was going on a fast and I decided to go along with her and it was gonna be a week. And I thought, no way, am I gonna be able to live, what's gonna happen to me? Am I gonna collapse? This is something I couldn't achieve or reach. If you're drinking adequately, you just feel a little discomfort for the first 48 to 72 hours. It gets boring after a while. It wasn't so much that I was hungry, but I really missed the taste, the flavor of foods.

- [Angelo] Mm.

- [John] Wouldn't slice of bread be nice or an apple or whatever one eats. You might even feel a bit of physical discomfort. Really, your body's so interesting, these hormones kicking in and this enteric nervous system saying to your brain, what the hell is going on? You're not managing things the way you're supposed to. Go out and track down an antelope and kill it and eat it now. But if you can resist that, if you get past that point, you reach a certain plateau and your body releases a whole bunch of hormones and stuff that are really cool. It became a very contemplative thing.

- [Angelo] Cool.

- [John] I'd be found staring off into, you get a little stoned. Okay, I don't know

- Yeah.

- [John] if you can say that, but you stare off into the distance. But that's not a bad thing to do once in a while. I'm going on way too long. And you guys have lives to get back to. No, no, no. But it's not incidental that fasting is so entwined with religions. I like the stepping back, stepping off the, sort of the, what are these runways you see in airports? The treadmills. Stepping off the treadmill, and then getting back on. I'm sure I complain constantly, but it's certainly easier to do with a partner, but it takes a commitment.

- [Angelo] What was different about fasting the second time around?

- [John] Sure, Angelo. So, I didn't feel the need to do it again. I really didn't think about it again very much until recently in the aftermath of the Trump administration. I really just felt this overriding need to purge myself and just get that out of my system. I wanted to get to a different state of thinking about things and I just spontaneously decided to go on another long fast. And I did it and it was an interesting experience. After two or three days, your body reaches a kind of a plane. This time, it wasn't so much a matter of, oh my god, am I gonna be able to live? And I was just more observant and not focusing so much on the how I was feeling. It was much more meditative experience, because I knew that I could go through it and come out perfectly healthy. And then, I got interested in the history and the process and what it does to your body.

- [Anne] Fasting is an ancient technology that's experiencing something of a revival right now. In health and fitness circles, intermittent fasting and calorie deprivation are hot topics. But when John Oakes set out to explore the concept, he took it a lot deeper. Producer Angelo Bautista wanted to know more about doing with less.

- [Angelo] You reiterate in the book that fasting is more than just about food. So, what is it about, you mentioned the process.

- [John] In our daily lives, we go through this thing called automaticity. In order to function, when you wake up, you get dressed and you don't think about maybe the process of tying your shoes or putting on your clothes or brushing your teeth, pouring yourself a cup of coffee. And a lot of that we just slip into unthinkingly. What interested me was this idea of holding back and creation. How when you step back, you allow something new to happen, maybe something you hadn't anticipated. And to me, that's a really interesting, exciting idea.

- [Angelo] Mm. What I hear in you talking about this is that fasting is about asserting agency and affirming boundaries between yourself and the rest of the world.

- [John] Absolutely. Completely. And even if the effect is evanescent, even if it goes away, because I slip back into my old habits, which is fine. You don't wanna become a perennial faster, somebody obsessed with this idea of, I think that is a danger that one has to be aware of if you undertake the fast. It's a mental, I guess, disorder that is sometimes called anorexia or fasting without end,

- Mm.

- [John] fasting that's impossible to achieve. A fast, if you're gonna undertake it, should be something that's of a limited duration that has very strong boundaries and during that time, you're thinking about other things. But you're right, it is a reconsideration of boundaries. It also helps you reflect on your own physical boundaries, the bodies in which we're all encased.

- [Angelo] I'm curious as to what actually happens to the body when we fast. We've had this long history of fasting. Do we have an understanding about what happens?

- [John] Well, I'm obviously not a medical professional, but I spoke to a few and it's really interesting. Everyone's body of course is different. And so, everyone's gonna react to a fast in different ways. The first few days of a fast, if you're on a liquid only fast, are generally quite uncomfortable. But then your body starts, this incredible machinery kicks in and these chemicals come out. This cocktail of chemicals starts happening. You have these things called ketone bodies and these endocannabinoids, which as it sounds, that are closely related to cannabis.

- Mm.

- You have serotonin, which is sometimes called the happy hormone. You have BHB, which is another hormone. All this stuff kicks in. Many people start feeling serene and calm, which I did and do when I fast for a long time. Some people like Cesar Chavez, the great labor leader who is a real serious faster, he said that about the fifth day of a fast, he would have this crystal clear memory and he could recall conversations word for word. That never happened to me. But that people do feel different things, but your body really does go through very interesting changes.

- [Angelo] Interesting.

- [John] What I would say is that it's not a cure all, as a lot of people said, oh, cure everything from the common cold to cancer. It's just not that clear what it does for you.

- [Angelo] Hmm. But we are learning more about the relationship between our gut and our brain.

- Yes.

- And you wrote something interesting that our gut is our largest sensory organ in our body and I'd never considered that before. So, what role does our gut play in our conscious experience and what does fasting do to that?

- [John] Well, it's sometimes called our second brain, the enteric nervous system, which is this really incredible mass, hundreds of millions of neurons second only to the brain that are sitting right there in our intestines and the stomach. And it matches up, I think, to the number of neurons in a dog cerebral cortex.

- Hmm.

- We have a dog's brain in our gut and that drives us. When you're fasting, you make a decision with your brain presumably to go against that, to differentiate yourself from the brain in your gut, and going with the brain in your head. And at the beginning, it's a little battle going on. I think for most people, certainly for me, the first day or two, it's a little uncomfortable, but for me, it's not really about the pain or the discomfort, it's the opening up and the reconsideration of who I am and how I fit into this world.

- [Angelo] I wanted to talk about where the roots of fasting begin. How far back can we trace this practice of fasting?

- [John] That's a good question. One early example of fasting is in the "Iliad". Achilles, after the death of Patroclus, his partner, he refuses to eat, then he goes into battle. And for some historians or classicists, that's been evidence of his blood lust. But for me, he was acknowledging the massive break in his life. And of course there's, in the Bible, there are many instances of fasting. There's Moses and of course Jesus with His 40 days, the Greeks, the Aztecs, Epicureans, the Stoics, Plato, everybody fasted now and again. And there's a lot of people fasting before battle, seeking to purify themselves.

- [Angelo] You mentioned that you were Jewish and you mentioned the Bible and it's interesting that this comes up in Abrahamic religions and how they are united in this tradition, but they differ as well.

- [John] Yes, in Islam, I was interested to learn that Ramadan is really a joyful experience. And if you're a strict Muslim, you fast from sun up to sundown and you don't drink anything. And then, in the evening, there's a repairing feast. But it's a time to be together with family and friends. And it's again, contemplative, but it doesn't have quite the punitive aspect that I associate with the Judeo-Christian tradition. And in Christianity, traditionally, it's been a way to mortify the flesh. They saw it as a way to transcend the flesh and become nearer to God. That's obviously a test of physical abilities and you don't really, at least, I didn't see that so much in the Islamic tradition. And the people I spoke to, the imams didn't.

- [Angelo] Hmm. I wanna talk about fasting as a form of protest. I was amazed to learn that hunger strikes are still ongoing. That these are still a thing that are happening.

- [John] All around the globe all the time. And it's happened as far back as we can see, I think. And of course there was the Brown University fasters who just days ago, ended their week-long fast in solidarity with what's going on in Palestine. It really was interesting to me how this seems to be something that's, it's not even a learned activity. It seems endemic to being human. This concept of saying, I don't like the way things are, I wanna stop and pull back. I can't get you to listen to me. And the one way I can really focus your attention is by saying, I'm putting my life on the line and I'm gonna go on a hunger strike. And it also forces the authorities to interact in a way they'd rather not. Authorities everywhere wanna be seen as the maintainers of order against chaos and evildoing. And I think a hunger strike is generally seen as a court of last resort.

- [Angelo] So, what is the through line of fasting as this kind of holy Aztec tradition to now it has become a dieting and wellness fad.

- Yeah.

- [Angelo] Even my parents are participating in intermittent fasting now.

- [John] I suppose it's fine if it makes people feel better about themselves. It makes their system function better, more power to them.

- Mm-hmm.

- [John] You could say what I object to is this idea that you need to go to these spas and spend... People spend like thousands and thousands of dollars. It's just inconceivable to me. You don't really need anything to fast. The whole-

- Fasting is free.

- [John] Fasting is free.

- [Angelo] It seems to me that in this culture of excess that we live in, it almost seems like there's a moral imperative to do less and to redirect ourselves. Are you seeing fasting coming into the culture more?

- [John] I don't know if there's an imperative to do less, but maybe an imperative to think about what we're consuming and how we do it and why. I think that is a good idea. I don't wanna bring it back to evil corporations, but people want us to buy and to keep buying and there is this tradition of you're feeling down, so you should buy stuff and consume stuff. And I think there is an increasing absolutely movement among people who are saying we should maybe consider what we need and what we don't need. And I think the number one element in landfill is food waste, which is astounding to me. Fasting can be a tool to get us there.

- [Anne] John Oakes is the author of "The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without". And that was producer Angelo Bautista talking with him. So, thinking about that point John and Angelo made that for people who live in a consumer economy, fasting or giving up could apply to a lot more than just food. Well, that made Steve Paulson track down psychoanalyst Adam Phillips who writes about giving up existentially as a path to feeling more alive.

- [Steve] You're talking about giving up your certainties, what is familiar in life and embracing the unknown.

- [Adam] Yes, but it could even be in a small localized way, a very good simple experiment in living, that you literally go outside and you don't focus on anything. You just see what you'll find yourself noticing if you don't focus. You allow yourself not to get caught up in focusing. You allow your attention to drift. It's very like the psychoanalytic version of this is free association. You don't speak coherently, you say whatever comes into your mind. And the speaking coherently in a way is an attempt to protect yourself from all the really enlivening incoherence inside you.

- [Steve] Are you talking about tapping into your unconscious, sort of bypassing that rational self?

- [Adam] Yes, a version of that or finding a way out of one's defensive self or oneself as one would like to see oneself.

- [Anne] Freedom through giving up next. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. There are two sides to giving up, the virtue of sacrifice and the sin of despair. And we get mixed messages about these. You wanna give up smoking or drinking or cheeseburgers, well, that's admirable. But if you're thinking about giving up your job or your marriage or your way of life, you run the risk of being called or calling yourself a failure. So, how do we decide which is which? That's the question psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asks in his newest book "On Giving Up". Here's Steve Paulson.

- [Steve] You know, Adam, for most people, I think the idea of giving up is actually kind of shameful. We celebrate people who keep going, especially when it involves sacrifice to do something that's really hard. Clearly, you have a much more nuanced view. What made you wanna start to think about giving up?

- [Adam] Well, I think partly for the reason you said that there is a great deal of shame attached to it. And it occurred to me that giving up is something we should be able to do in certain situations and that if we live in a culture as I think we do, in which persistence and seeing things through and finishing things off is highly valued, it makes giving up extremely difficult. And I think we all know from experience that clearly some relationships should be given up on, some interests are given up on in actuality, that our pleasures change and so on. And so, I suppose I was interested in the difference between the fact that when we give something up, like say chocolate or alcohol, we believe we can change. And when we give up, we believe we can't.

- [Steve] You say the question that really interests you is not why do we give up, but why don't we give up? Which is fascinating, I have to say.

- [Adam] Yes. I think it's linked in my mind with the way in which we're taught or some of us are taught, to put up with things, to endure, and not to be able to consider whether actually we are really enjoying something. And in some situations, the harder it is, the better it seemed to be. Now, clearly, you can't become an athlete or a piano player without going through a great deal of suffering, because these skills require working through resistances. But some resistances mean you actually don't like something, it's not for you. I want to differentiate between the real difficulty of mastering something one values and a different kind of difficulty, which is giving up on something one really doesn't want to do. I can remember going to my daughter's parent-teacher meeting and the teacher said to me, "The trouble with she only works a subject she's interested in." And I thought, good for her.

- [Steve] It doesn't sound like really a problem, although I guess if you wanna be a master pianist, maybe you gotta push through it even when you're not enjoying it.

- [Adam] But we all know we learned lots of things in school that we were not interested in and that probably wasn't tremendously good for us.

- [Steve] So, let's talk about what is actually involved in giving up. You say it's giving up the wanting. Can you explain what you mean?

- [Adam] Yes, that in a way you could think what keeps us going is our appetite. We're going to become hungry in the next hour or so. And of course there are lots of different kinds of appetite. There's an appetite for safety, there's an appetite for protection, there's an appetite for sex. All these appetites are in a sense what fuel us or form us or inspire us. So, it seems to me that our relationship to our desire, to our appetite is very revealing in terms of how much we want to live, whether we want as much pleasure and satisfaction and gratification, enjoyment as we're able to have or whether we want as little as possible. And so, it's something about people's relationship to pleasure, because the problem with pleasure is that on the one hand, it can be overwhelming and on the other hand, if someone or something gives us pleasure, we can begin to feel dependent on them or even addicted. So, pleasure is very problematic. It's on the one hand the thing that sustains us, but it's potentially dangerous. And this is again, something that psychoanalysis has interesting things to say about. We can be as frightened of pleasure as we are of suffering.

- [Steve] But the way you're talking about this, it sounds like it's deprivation. The not wanting is putting aside the thing that we actually do want, but we're gonna try to forget about it in some way. My sense is you're talking about something more profound to not want to actually lose that desire in the first place.

- [Adam] Most of the world religions that I know about are very often about self-depriving strategies for higher ends, if you like, as though there's something about our animal nature that is a huge problem for us. And to develop, to become enlightened, to grow up whatever our project or aim is, involves the renunciation of certain pleasures and satisfactions. Now, of course, everybody knows having been a child that life is intrinsically very frustrating, but it can be so frustrating that one wants to turn against desiring or if it's just the right amount of frustration, then of course that sustains our desire. We go on wanting. If I'm not fed for two weeks, it wouldn't be odd if I began to lose my appetite, but if I'm fed every other day, I'll be hungry.

- [Steve] Now, in Freudian terms, he talked about the death instinct, this forbidden attraction to not living anymore.

- Mm.

- [Steve] You reframe this as the giving up instinct.

- [Adam] Well, Freud has what is in many ways is a very strange idea, which is our lives are the battle between life instincts and death instincts. There's a part of ourselves that wants as much life and as much pleasure as we can manage. And there's a part of ourselves that wants as little life as possible, that wants to anesthetize ourselves, that wants to more or less be dead or close to dead as we can, unstimulated but safe. Now, what Freud is flagging up is the possibility there is a part of ourselves that really doesn't want to live, that can't bear it. And it would seem to me everybody who is at all awake has at least had moments or periods in their lives where they felt their lives were actually unbearable.

- [Steve] My sense is that for you, that death instinct, is something we all, I think we all can resonate with at one time or another in our lives. I guess the question is, how deeply does that cut with most of us, do you think?

- Well, yes. I agree with you in the sense of a great deal of work goes into deadening ourselves to insensitizing ourselves, to enduring ourselves, say to other people's suffering and to our own. So, there's a lot of evidence I think that suggests that we at least intermittently find life unbearable. Now, the question, if you are not a religious person, the question is what is the point of suffering? If you are a religious person, there are lots of good stories about why one might and must and should suffer. If you are not a religious person, the question is what is the point of one's suffering or why go on living one's life if one's not enjoying it? And there are answers, which is, some of us have children, some of us have responsibilities, some of us want to defend values that seem very important. But on the other hand, it would seem to me there are real grounds in some lives for absolute despair. And I think that has to be part of the conversation, otherwise it becomes phobic. Otherwise, it's as though we've all got to be more or less upbeat and we don't feel it all the time.

- [Steve] To let in the despair, to acknowledge it, and to talk about it. That's important.

- [Adam] Yes. And to see if anything can be made of it. Not assuming that everything can be transformed into something good and wonderful, but actually seeing where we go with our feelings. And that in a way is what psychoanalysis, a lot of the talking therapy is about, which is finding out what it is you do happen to feel and think and finding what you can make of it, if anything.

- [Steve] You write about the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, who has a really fascinating take on how we think about these things like happiness and fulfillment and how does that figure in our lives. And she thought that a lot of it comes down to how we notice the things in our lives. And she had this distinction between what she called narrow attention and wide attention.

- Yeah.

- Can you explain that?

- [Adam] Yes. And I think it is a wonderful distinction. In narrow attention, it's as though we know what we're looking for and we find it if we can. And she talks about it as predatory or as full of appetite. Whereas wide-angled attention is almost what it says it is, which is you look widely without knowing what you are looking for or that you are looking for anything. So, your capacity to be affected and to receive stimuli is wide open. Marion Milner who I knew, once said to me, "When I paint a tree in a field, I look at everything but the tree." In other words, she needed to really open her eyes. And what she's saying is that we sacrifice a great deal in being focused, in having our attention over organized. So, she doesn't say one kind of attention is better than the other. She says these kinds of two different kinds of attention are better for different things.

- [Steve] But she's saying that if you're convinced that you know what you want going into this or what you're paying attention to, that's gonna narrow

- Yes.

- [Steve] How you see the world. Your perceptions will be limited and your, I mean, it's the opposite of curiosity, I guess.

- [Adam] Exactly it is. And I think what's being suggested here is that there's always a temptation to narrow our minds, because actually, we are extremely complex and extremely receptive. It creates an anxiety in us. And so, if we can find a way of narrowing our minds, it's as though there's a relief in that. But then of course all we've got is a narrowed mind and you can see addiction, for example, is an acute case of this. If I think what do I want? I want a cigarette. It's as though it has been sorted out. But in the very act of narrowing our minds, of diminishing our complexity, we lose a great deal other wishes and wants.

- [Steve] So, this practice of wide attention is very appealing, but it also seems pretty hard. You're talking about giving up your certainties, what is familiar in life and embracing the unknown.

- [Adam] Yes. But it could even be in a small localized way, a very good simple experiment in living, that you literally go outside and you don't focus on anything. You just see what you'll find yourself noticing if you don't focus and you allow yourself not to get caught up in focusing. You allow your attention to drift. It's very like the psychoanalytic version of this is free association, where you don't speak coherently, you say whatever comes into your mind. And the speaking coherently in a way is an attempt to protect yourself from all the really enlivening incoherence inside you.

- [Steve] Are you talking about tapping into your unconscious, sort of bypassing that default mode network, sort of our rational self?

- [Adam] Yes, a version of that or finding a way out of one's defensive self or one's self as one would like to see one's self. And of course it's very familiar in adolescence, whereas I think in a way, it's where it starts. That feeling that one is really in one's body. And I think it's something to do also strangely or paradoxically, with being able to forget oneself, to be absorbed in other people and other things. When somebody's anxious or depressed or whatever, they are self-obsessed. They have to be, because they're looking after themselves. So, again, I would say the aim of say, psychoanalysis, is to enable people to forget about themselves. Not to become more interested in themselves, but less interested, and therefore more interested another people and the world.

- [Steve] That's fascinating, because I guess I would've guessed that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to know yourself, to gain self-knowledge.

- Yes.

- Sounds like that's not what you're saying, is it?

- [Adam] The official story is you need to increase your self-knowledge to have the life you want. Now, it seems to me in some areas that's right, but for me more prominently, the idea is you really need to be able to forget yourself in order to engage other people in the world. See, I think this is not a modest comment. I think one is the least interesting person one knows in actuality.

- [Steve] So, we are just about at the end of this conversation here. And there was one point in your book that really struck me. You say that giving up requires a sense of an ending. What's a good ending?

- [Adam] Well, I think when you feel the business is finished, when you feel you've completed something to your satisfaction, when you feel it's necessary now to do something else without feeling you've had to sacrifice something in the process.

- [Steve] An ending is not necessarily a sense of completion, it's something different.

- Yes. It's just something has finished and it's as though one now needs to do something else.

- [Anne] Adam Phillips. His book is called "On Giving Up" and that was Steve Paulson talking with him. Coming up, I'm not sure, a conversation on the wonder and wisdom of uncertainty. I'm Anne Strainchamps and this is "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. This hour, we're learning how to give up, which oftentimes means facing down a lot of uncertainty. So, what better place to learn about uncertainty than in an operating room, the one place where you can't give up.

- [Maggie] I went up to Toronto, not only because I saw a lot of references to uncertainty in medicine, which makes sense, but also I thought that seems like the last thing you would want is an unsure surgeon. I connected with an incredible, brilliant expert on surgical judgment, Carol-Anne Moulton. And she actually allowed me to come up and watch operations. One morning, we were watching her colleague, who was a hepatobiliary specialist, a top surgeon. He was performing a liver resection, taking out the cancerous half of a liver of a school teacher from up north. And I was allowed into the operating room with my little tape recorder. I was feet from the patient. I had to say to myself, Maggie, don't faint, 'cause I'm not actually that great with blood. But it was really interesting, because he was very efficient and impressive, the kind of guy who would like to listen to music. And he was barking orders and he was just that suave in control all-knowing expert. And yet the operation came to a halt. The room fell silent and I could actually hear a phone ringing that no one was answering and I didn't know quite what was going on. Turns out he thought he had cut the bile duct, which is an anathema, it's a bile duct that's quite close to the liver and it's called a never event. As in no one should ever do this. It was a very serious moment. It turns out later that he was actually just a few millimeters off target in the liver, and so he was fine. But the fact that he exemplifies what we think of is the best kind of expert and yet you could see his limits, the limits of knowing just what to do, automaticity of honed knowledge, that kind of heuristic thinking that we so naturally depend on. You could see the limits of that in stark relief right there.

- [Anne] Maggie Jackson uses that story to open her new book, "Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure", a book about the surprising benefits of not knowing. It turns out there is an emerging science of uncertainty, a whole new frontier in psychology, artificial intelligence, and yes, surgery, where things can go very wrong when people are missing a crucial skillset, being unsure. So, when this guy is doing the surgery, did he seem completely confident?

- [Maggie] Yes, until that moment. He kept urging the junior surgeon who was helping him to go faster and faster. He kept treating the situation as if it was all routine, as if he knew just what to do. He was barreling into the situation without accommodating for the fact that this was the crux of the operation. And he was quite horrified in some ways. He later said he was ashamed by the moment and then later we sat in the cafeteria, Carol-Anne Moulton and the senior surgeon and I, and he and she dissected the moment and he basically said, "Well, that's just how you have to be. You have to be speedy, you have to be doubt-free, you have to be... He was clinging to this model of the old school expert.

- [Anne] Hmm. So, this is a case where the stakes are astronomically high. The patient on the operating table can die if the wrong choices are made. So, the surgeon must feel enormous pressure to be right, to be certain, but here you are saying that that is exactly what a surgeon in this case needs to give up. Why?

- [Maggie] Well, because life is so unpredictable. Change is so much a part of our day-to-day lives, that if we believe that anything actually can be certain, we're fooling ourselves.

- Mm.

- And by being uncertain, I mean strategically or productively or skillfully, however you put it, we're actually allowing ourselves to be nimble and adaptable to life. We're opening up life, and so it flies in the face of common sense, but only so far as our common sense. Our cultural ideas about uncertainty have been so wrong for so long. We live in this outcome-oriented, efficiency-oriented, answer-oriented society, exacerbated by technological ease to download instant pat answers. And so, therefore, I think we've lost a great deal of understanding of how much literal information and knowledge and benefit can be had from not knowing. It's not nothingness. I'm using a lot of negatives, but not knowing or not yet knowing or being unsure is actually a frontier itself and again, a state or a mindset of tremendous potential.

- [Anne] Until, I picked up your book, it had not really occurred to me how much we prize being certain. I think we find the state of being uncertain or unsure to be scary and threatening and anxiety-producing.

- [Maggie] Yes, that's an important idea to unpack and dissect, because when you are uncertain, that is when you are meeting something new, unexpected, ambiguous. So, basically, when we do meet up with something new, we have a kind of stress response that produces the unease, but actually, is the instigator for a huge number of changes to the brain. Your working memory expands, your focus sharpens. Scientists call this curious eyes. No-

- Curious eyes? Really, I love that.

- Yes, yes.

- [Anne] Curious eyes. What do they look like?

- [Maggie] Well, your focus is sharpened and broadened. So, you are revved up. Basically, uncertainty is actually seen as a signal. One neuroscientist told me, "It's brain telling itself that there's something to be learned here." So, that plays this really wonderful role, not only in waking us up, but also in pushing us away from that automaticity that we live most of our days. So, it's an invitation to learn. That's the best part of uncertainty. And that's where the unease comes from. And that's just why we shouldn't mistake that for fear. We also live in a society that's really uncomfortable with discomfort, whether it's getting a snack through DoorDash or getting a Google answer that may or may not be right or getting an AI assistant to book you something. You have instant answers. Things are with a click. And very much, the subtext is you don't have to be uncomfortable. Stay in your happy place, stay in your echo chamber.

- [Anne] It's interesting. It seems like one of the underlying messages is be curious, but I would've thought that curiosity would be a hallmark of our age. I think about how many of us conduct how many Google searches a day. We're constantly exploring and open to the new.

- [Maggie] Well, yes, in some ways, but if you look at how often our explorations online anyhow are funneled by the software, when you ask Google a question, it gives you an answer before you even finish asking the question.

- Hmm.

- When it offers you search results, study after study shows people take the first search result and 75% of postings that are shared are not even read before doing so.

- Wow.

- So, I think that maybe we can call this curious, but maybe it's a reduced, narrowed, constricted form of curiosity that keeps leading us back to what's familiar and safe. Curiosity takes many, many different forms, but one pillar of curiosity is actually personality-wise, the ability to tolerate the stress of the unknown.

- [Anne] Do you worry about the advent of AI and machine learning? 'Cause I'm just thinking, I have not played around a lot with ChatGPT, but a little bit. And you put a question in and in less than 10 seconds, it's spit out 50 people I should talk to or whatever. But I am a little nervous about giving up that kind of free-floating searching that I'm used to doing. I don't know, what do you think?

- [Maggie] I'm really worried very much about our faith in the human mind.

- [Anne] Hmm.

- [Maggie] Because I think we see the mind too often as a deficient machine. The more quick and powerful AI gets, the more we see it as the ideal. When it really is only a certain type of thinking. It's quick, it's heuristic, it's not reflective. It's only better than the human in a very, very, very narrow way. And one of the most important points to this, it's exciting and yet it's dangerous, is that so much of the science around uncertainty is completely new. So, that's exciting.

- Hmm.

- So, we have the chance to learn about the liminal. We have the chance to learn about consciousness and daydreaming and deliberation, et cetera.

- Mm-hmm.

- But the reason it's new is because it was not considered topics of study for psychology. That's changing. But we really have to understand that these foggy liminal now semi understood ways of thinking and being are just as important if not more critical in this age as a counterpoint to AI. This is a very important moment.

- [Anne] So that in some ways, just as we are craving certainty most, what we need is to give it up. and it's interesting, because reading the book, I really did feel a kind of lessening of anxiety. So, I'm curious about, I don't know, how you would diagnose our collective psychic burden and what happens when you do mentally try to let go of that need for certainty and embrace a little more uncertainty?

- [Maggie] Yes, many, many people have used the word liberating. Doctors who are trained to tolerate ambiguity in their work say it gives them courage, because they no longer not only feel pressure to perform in a certain way, to wear a mask, but they also feel as though they've gained a little time and space to consider and reconsider the problem. It really changed my life to discover this new science of uncertainty. It really-

- How so?

- [Maggie] Well, I've relinquished the idea that there has to be a certain outcome.

- Hmm.

- I'm more able to live in the moment. If I'm with a person in distress, a daughter calls me in tears, one of my daughters, or I'm with a friend, I used to think that I need to be at least one of, if not the fixer.

- Mm-hmm.

- [Maggie] And I used to think that, especially with my daughter, that I had to offer a solution. Why don't you do this, this, and this? And the quality of my presence or friendship or relationship or love was based on the quality of my answer. And now, I really feel as though, it really actually moves me to think about this, I really find that I can be in the moment, which is essentially uncertainty and we can explore possibilities if they want to. Or I can even just acknowledge the fact that they're in this liminal gray zone, that they've given up or left behind a certain answer. But to be there with them. And I also realize that's exactly what I've always wanted from another. That's what I want for them to be in the unknown with me.

- [Anne] I think that is such a deep and profoundly wise thing that you're saying. But I'm trying to figure out how to hold onto that in real life, 'cause it's not so easy. What do you do? Have you found ways to try to remember, let go, hold onto not knowing, I don't have to know.

- [Maggie] Yes, I think that small steps are cliche, but they really do help, because this is a matter of practicing and not only first having that amazing recognition that life is not just a series of answers, nor does it have to be.

- Mm.

- [Maggie] But then secondarily, trying it out, the root word, entomology of the word expert is actually to try, which is something that's forgotten. So, I've drawn some inspiration from some interventions now that are being undertaken to actually treat people's intolerance of uncertainty. Really?

- Yes. This is a very hot topic in clinical psychology. The way that scientists have done this and succeeded in doing so is by riffing off exposure therapy, challenging people to take little steps to basically dip their toe in the waters of the unknown. So, it might be as something as simple as trying a new dish at a restaurant. And that seems silly. And I laughed when I read that in a scientific paper. But then I thought to myself, hmm, on weekends, I like to go to that restaurant. I like to have that same dish. In fact, I'm pretty wedded for years to mocha chip ice cream and I'm not... So, I could use some tiny little nudges into the unknown. These little steps, delegate more at work or let your kid pack their own suitcase for a trip. Or let go. That's what it's about.

- [Anne] So, I have to end by asking you about wonder, 'cause the subtitle of your book is "The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure". I love the idea that uncertainty can be a kind of doorway into wonder, but how so and why?

- [Maggie] Well, I think in light of giving up and the idea of relinquishing, and we've talked a lot about relinquishing the known in order to move into the unknown. That's exactly what daydreams do. The creative daydream is actually moving away from the known and into the what if question. And I think wonder for me, I don't have a clinical definition of what wonder is, but it's really a vessel, my shorthand for all of what I'm talking about, moving into the unknown and being open-eyed and curious about it. I find that this opening up, that uncertainty gives you, if you can pick up its invitation, changes everything.

- [Anne] Thank you. My anxiety levels just ratcheted way down. I feel like I just learned so much from your book, so thanks.

- [Maggie] I'm so glad. I'm so glad. Yeah, I first talked about this as a work in progress way, way back at Macalester College where one of my daughters was going and I really didn't know what I was talking about even then. I mean at that time. They wanted me to do a career talk and I said, oh, I'll talk about uncertainty. And I just said kind of feeble, but slightly illuminating things like if you're uncertain, you're thinking. And all these students in the room, their little shoulders just went down. And then, faculty were hugging me afterwards and I thought, oh my gosh, there's something here.

- [Anne] Yeah.

- [Maggie] It was really interesting that there was like a release in the room. People are so burdened by certainty. Yeah.

- [Anne] Maggie Jackson, author of "Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure". "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin by Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane, Mark Riechers, and Angelo Bautista. Our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hardtke with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this week comes from Swirl, Ana Moya, Johnny Ripper, Ketza, and Purple Cat. Our executive producer is Steve Paulson. And I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for staying with us.

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