Speaker 1: What does it mean for your life to matter?
Speaker 2: Is the drive to matter sometimes stronger than the drive
Speaker 2: to survive? We humans talk a lot about happiness and
Speaker 2: pleasure and meaning, but what if the real engine underneath
Speaker 2: all of it is the need to feel that we count?
Speaker 2: Is it possible that depression and extremism and ambition all
Speaker 2: stem from the same psychological source? When is political polarization
Speaker 2: less about beliefs and more about threatened significance? Today we're
Speaker 2: going to speak with philosopher and writer Rebecca Goldstein, who
Speaker 2: has written a new book on what matters to people
Speaker 2: and why and why it's not the same for everyone,
Speaker 2: and why mattering is a fundamental instinct that underlies all
Speaker 2: the others. Welcome to intercouse most with me, David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these
Speaker 2: episodes we sailed deeply into our three pound universe to
Speaker 2: understand how we experienced.
Speaker 3: The world.
Speaker 1: When I was younger.
Speaker 2: One of the great mentors I got to work with
Speaker 2: was Francis Crick, who had won the Nobel Prize for
Speaker 2: discovering the structure of DNA. As you may know, in
Speaker 2: the second half of Krick's career, he turned from studying
Speaker 2: genetics to studying the brain, and specifically the question of
Speaker 2: how the physical stuff of the brain gives rise to consciousness. Now,
Speaker 2: Krick had a chalkboard that was full of ideas and equations,
Speaker 2: but the most striking thing to me was that that
Speaker 2: right in the middle of the board, outlined in a big,
Speaker 2: thick rectangle, was a single word. And this word represented
Speaker 2: to him one of the central mysteries of biology.
Speaker 1: The word was meaning.
Speaker 2: In other words, he had a better understanding than most
Speaker 2: people on the planet of the vast and intricate biology
Speaker 2: that makes up the human brain. But he recognized that
Speaker 2: one of the key questions was why does anything matter
Speaker 2: to your brain? You can look at the visual system
Speaker 2: and you can come to understand how photons hit the
Speaker 2: retina and the signals move to the visual cortex in
Speaker 2: the back of the brain, and you can get a
Speaker 2: sense of how the sigles move around and get processed,
Speaker 2: and get a reasonable understanding of how this all works
Speaker 2: from single cells to feedback at the global level. That
Speaker 2: equates to expectations. And you can do the same thing
Speaker 2: with hearing and touch and so on. But no amount
Speaker 2: of that very important kind of science gives you insight
Speaker 2: into why anything matters. Why is there any meaning at all?
Speaker 2: In other words, why don't we just run like computers,
Speaker 2: where we process signals and have inputs and outputs. Why
Speaker 2: do we instead care so much about our lives and
Speaker 2: accomplishments and whether people like us, and whether events have
Speaker 2: meaning to us? Why do we ask whether we are
Speaker 2: doing something significant with our time? Now, there's a sense
Speaker 2: in which neuroscience speaks to this. We talk about reward
Speaker 2: circuitry and prediction errors and salience networks, and psychology gives
Speaker 2: us language about attention and bias and motivation.
Speaker 1: But behind the.
Speaker 2: Circuitry and the jargon, there's still a deep question. You
Speaker 2: might be objectively safe and fed and housed, and yet
Speaker 2: you need to feel that your life registers, that you're
Speaker 2: somehow making a dent somewhere. It's the difference between surviving
Speaker 2: and signifying from a neuroscience point of view that remains
Speaker 2: difficult territory to access. Evolution can explain why we care
Speaker 2: about food and shelter and reproduction, but we humans also
Speaker 2: care fiercely about other things, about whether our work is respected,
Speaker 2: whether our team wins, whether our group identity is affirmed,
Speaker 2: whether a text message gets answered, whether a stranger on
Speaker 2: the internet agrees with us, whether our absence would be noticed,
Speaker 2: whether someone is proud of us, whether we feel replaceable,
Speaker 2: whether our existence registers at all beyond the.
Speaker 1: Private theater of our own minds.
Speaker 2: And there's a related question, why is one person willing
Speaker 2: to sacrifice everything for an artistic project that no one
Speaker 2: else understands? And another person finds fulfillment through family and
Speaker 2: another through God, another through achievement, another through domination, same species,
Speaker 2: same brain architecture. But people can have very different maps
Speaker 2: of significance. So the question that's kept nagging at me
Speaker 2: ever since I saw that chalkboard in Francis Krik's office
Speaker 2: is this, what is the brain's code for meaning? What
Speaker 2: does it mean psychologically and neurologically for something to feel
Speaker 2: like it matters? Now, this question about mattering and the
Speaker 2: brain is a big interdisciplinary question. It lives at the
Speaker 2: intersection of neuroscience and psychology and philosophy. So I called
Speaker 2: my colleague, the philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, because she's been
Speaker 2: thinking about the issue of mattering for decades.
Speaker 1: How does this.
Speaker 2: Longing to matter shape our identity, our relationships, our cultures,
Speaker 2: and the political world that we're all trying to share.
Speaker 2: Goldstein has just written a new book on this, called
Speaker 2: The Mattering Instinct, which is about this deep human drive
Speaker 2: not just to survive, but to matter to ourselves and others.
Speaker 2: Rebecca Goldstein is a MacArthur Genius Fellow, a Fellow of
Speaker 2: the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she was
Speaker 2: warded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. So today
Speaker 2: we're going to explore her idea that each of us
Speaker 2: carries around a kind of inner mattering map that tells
Speaker 2: us who and what is significant. Here's my interview with
Speaker 2: Rebecca Goldstein. So, Rebecca, to get us oriented, what do
Speaker 2: you mean by the mattering instinct? And how do you
Speaker 2: explain that to people at dinner parties.
Speaker 3: I think we are programmed to act on a very
Speaker 3: deep motivation that often goes hid in. But it is
Speaker 3: a long matter.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by matter?
Speaker 3: You know, we use this word matter all over the
Speaker 3: place of the verb to matter. We talk about what matters,
Speaker 3: and we talk about who matters. And I think its
Speaker 3: core meaning, deep down is to be deserving of attention,
Speaker 3: So it has that notion of deserving this built into
Speaker 3: it what philosophers call a normative concept, something that has
Speaker 3: to do with with our values. So that term mattering
Speaker 3: already gets us into this domain of values. We want
Speaker 3: to know what's a value, We want to know who's
Speaker 3: a value, And our mattering instinct is that we desperately
Speaker 3: want ourselves to be among those who matter, who are
Speaker 3: deserving of attention, interestingly, our own attention.
Speaker 2: And you argue that this longing to matter is the
Speaker 2: crux of human motivation. What makes you feel that this
Speaker 2: longing to matter is more important than the pursuit of
Speaker 2: pleasure or truth or survival?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean many of us pursue are mattering by
Speaker 3: ketenistic pursuit of pleasure, of truth, the knowledge of beauty,
Speaker 3: of creativity, of power, of fame. But beneath all of
Speaker 3: these things is this more basic, uh, motivation to to
Speaker 3: prove that we are deserving of all of the attention
Speaker 3: that we have to give ourselves in order to live
Speaker 3: a coherently human life. Uh. And we that that is
Speaker 3: what I think the longing to matter is all about.
Speaker 3: And all these other motivations that give us the arc
Speaker 3: of the narrative of our life, our ways of trying
Speaker 3: to respond to to realize this deep longing. It's even more.
Speaker 4: Powerful than the longing to live to survive.
Speaker 3: People will sacrifice their lives if they think that that's
Speaker 3: what's required in order to realize their mattering instinct, or
Speaker 3: in the very very tragic cases where they think they can't,
Speaker 3: which is clinically known as as depression, whose most characteristic
Speaker 3: expression is I don't matter. Others do, but I don't,
Speaker 3: I can't, I never will. They will, in fact often
Speaker 3: and their life or or contemplate empty their lives. So
Speaker 3: it's belief deeper even matter instinct.
Speaker 2: For survi, how do you distinguish wanting to matter from
Speaker 2: the desire to be admired or loved? Are these different flavors?
Speaker 2: Are they trying to get it the same thing?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 3: Freud had said that the two cornerstones of our humanness.
Speaker 4: Are love and work, and I would amend pride.
Speaker 3: And volubility to say that are the two cornerstones of
Speaker 3: our humanness? Are longing for connectedness, which is also involves mattering,
Speaker 3: but distinct from that as a separate motivation. This longing
Speaker 3: to matter so connectedness, I think has something to do
Speaker 3: with having people in our lives who will give us
Speaker 3: special attention, whether we deserve it or not. It's kind
Speaker 3: of unconditional. That's what we needed as the helpless creatures.
Speaker 3: We're born into a helplessness unmatched in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 3: You know, it takes to our early adulthood for the
Speaker 3: last bits of our brain, when we're all the mature
Speaker 3: stuff takes place to fall into place. So we're extremely
Speaker 3: dependent on other people, and we are like that for
Speaker 3: the rest of our lives. That there must be certain
Speaker 3: people that I count as those people who are in
Speaker 3: my life, my families, my friends, my you know, romantic partner,
Speaker 3: my colleagues, my neighbors, perhaps the members of my community
Speaker 3: whose attention I feel is coming to me. And just
Speaker 3: as we felt as children led the attention of our
Speaker 3: family members were coming to us.
Speaker 4: And that's always in place.
Speaker 3: We are gregarious creatures, evolved from gregarious creatures, born into
Speaker 3: a great helplessness. It takes a very long long time
Speaker 3: for us to outgrow that is connectedness, and connectedness has
Speaker 3: to do with our relationship with others. The mannering instinct
Speaker 3: has to do with our relationship with ourselves, and as
Speaker 3: I say, if it's not realized, we feel.
Speaker 4: Disgusted with ourselves.
Speaker 3: I've known some people close to me who have gone
Speaker 3: into the deepest of depressions and there's this kind of
Speaker 3: just self clothing. They can't stand to be in the
Speaker 3: presence of themselves anymore. That shows that there is something that.
Speaker 4: We all need.
Speaker 3: It in their privation of this need, it's it shows up,
Speaker 3: but what a good life, of life of flourishing requires.
Speaker 3: And in the book, I define different strategies for satisfying
Speaker 3: the mannering instinct. And although I would say that we're
Speaker 3: all alive in sharing this deep motivation, in fact, what
Speaker 3: I think I think the most elegant expression for what
Speaker 3: our species is creatures of manner too long to matter.
Speaker 3: And for some people it really is the connectedness that
Speaker 3: we all need.
Speaker 4: That doesn't I call them socializers?
Speaker 3: You know that to have the people in their lives
Speaker 3: paying the attention to them that they require it does
Speaker 3: it for them? That is how their mannering instinct is satisfied.
Speaker 3: And I think that's probably true for most people. I've
Speaker 3: been talking to people about this for over four decades now,
Speaker 3: just because I find it really interesting. I find the
Speaker 3: diversity of the way that people try to realize this
Speaker 3: common motivation fascinating. But there are other.
Speaker 4: Ways of doing it.
Speaker 3: It's still needing that connectedness. I think that's always a
Speaker 3: given in almost everybody's life. I know a few mathematicians
Speaker 3: who don't seem to connectedness at all. But there are
Speaker 3: these other ways of doing it. The people I call
Speaker 3: transcenders who seek their mattering in some sort of metaphysical
Speaker 3: belief about the nature of the universe, that there is
Speaker 3: some transcendent presence, whether they call it God or something else,
Speaker 3: who purposefully created them and whose purpose gives them their purpose,
Speaker 3: gives them what I call mattering project Uh, that's what
Speaker 3: makes them feel as if they matter.
Speaker 4: So there are these transcenders religious the spiritual.
Speaker 3: Uh, there are people I call heroics drivers, and they're
Speaker 3: not trying to really matter to others, not to other mortals,
Speaker 3: and not to you know, some transcendent being that they
Speaker 3: may believe exists. It's there. There's it's really a matter
Speaker 3: of some standards of excellence that they've said for themselves
Speaker 3: to be intellectual, artistic, athletic, ethical, and maybe some combination
Speaker 3: of those and that's that's what gives the purpose to
Speaker 3: their life. And then there are the competitors who understand
Speaker 3: this question of mattering in zero some terms. To matter
Speaker 3: to them means to matter more than others. So it's
Speaker 3: interesting when I talk to people about mattering, people hear
Speaker 3: that question, how do you go about your mattery? According to.
Speaker 2: Their strategy A central idea and your framework is the
Speaker 2: mattering map.
Speaker 1: What is the mattering map?
Speaker 2: And how does that differ from values or identity or
Speaker 2: personal narrative.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sort of contains all of those things, I think.
Speaker 3: But what I've noticed in this pretty long life at
Speaker 3: this point is that it's hard to live a human life.
Speaker 3: People need to feel like some purpose, something that gives
Speaker 3: some coherence to their life, and a life that's meaningful
Speaker 3: in their own eyes.
Speaker 4: But the projects that are taken.
Speaker 3: On within these four strategies are so diverse, so many,
Speaker 3: I mean pick up artists and just reading today in
Speaker 3: the Washington Post about a man whose project was to
Speaker 3: walk the whole planet. He's almost done with it now,
Speaker 3: but that's his project, or you know, I don't know.
Speaker 3: You saw that movie Julia and Julie about this young
Speaker 3: woman who liked to cook but she was in the doldrums.
Speaker 3: I think she was a would be writer and it
Speaker 3: wasn't going anywhere.
Speaker 4: And her project was to.
Speaker 3: Make every true perfection, every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook
Speaker 3: in the Heart of French Cooking a tattoo. Artists, so
Speaker 3: train spots, analytic philosophers, mathematicians of the Saints. So there
Speaker 3: are many, many, many regions on the mattering math. And
Speaker 3: I think of these four strategies as the kind of
Speaker 3: continents of the mattering math. There are transcendors, many ways
Speaker 3: of being a transcender. Christianity itself has forty four thousand
Speaker 3: worldwide detominations. Words have been shed, I needn't say over
Speaker 3: the disagreements among those who are very close on the
Speaker 3: mattery map. But you know the way one defines this,
Speaker 3: and it does have to do very much with our
Speaker 3: identity and what we think we're about, what we're supposed
Speaker 3: to do here. As I say, what makes our lives
Speaker 3: keeps us engaged in our lives. And it's when it
Speaker 3: dies you're in bad shape and we don't know how
Speaker 3: to go forward.
Speaker 2: So in your book, you bring this idea to life
Speaker 2: through several stories. Scott Joplin, William James, a woman rescuing infants,
Speaker 2: a former neo Nazi skinhead. Tell us about those people
Speaker 2: and how they matter to the story and what they
Speaker 2: represent about mattering theorious theory.
Speaker 3: But to really bring these ideas alive, you have to
Speaker 3: look at people's lives stories. I could just start with
Speaker 3: William James. Actually William James, who was a great favorite
Speaker 3: of mine, both a psychologist and a philosopher. Multi talented.
Speaker 3: He got a medical degree first. He wanted to be
Speaker 3: an artist. He did have great artistic talent. His father
Speaker 3: was a kind of a religious thinker, Sweden Bornian, very
Speaker 3: supportive family, very supportive community. Multi talent, but he didn't
Speaker 3: know where to put his his talents. He was what
Speaker 3: I call the heroic driver, or somebody who was mattering.
Speaker 3: Instinct demands excellence in some or more areas that they're
Speaker 3: very high standards of excellence, and he wasn't fulfilling those.
Speaker 3: He went from art to medicine and he fell into
Speaker 3: a really deep depression. He was prostate on his bed.
Speaker 3: He you know, he couldn't get any energy. He is
Speaker 3: such an example I think of what happens to a
Speaker 3: person who's got all of the connectedness, the beautiful, wonderful relationships.
Speaker 3: But that's something else that by temperament, by talent, whatever
Speaker 3: it is, uh, demands of his mannering instinct, something aside
Speaker 3: from connectiviusy Is was a heroic striver. And until he
Speaker 3: found his niche in psychology and philosophy, lending them together
Speaker 3: in a way that I re there, he couldn't go
Speaker 3: forward and uh, and then he was known as a
Speaker 3: person of tremendous energy. He was just always going. And
Speaker 3: so this to me, I mean he I should say
Speaker 3: that he had a sister. She was the youngest of
Speaker 3: those five children, and she had she was also born
Speaker 3: to be a heroic striver. She had the same kind
Speaker 3: of temperament as her search to older brothers Henry and William.
Speaker 3: Being a Victorian woman, she had no place to put that,
Speaker 3: and she turned it into She was a mattering project
Speaker 3: was an invalidist. She was an invalid. She was a
Speaker 3: lifelong invalid. When she finally developed cancer at age I
Speaker 3: think was forty two, died at forty four, she was grateful,
Speaker 3: but at least she had a diagnosable illness.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, she was suffering from severe depression.
Speaker 3: And so to me, this family, the James family, it's
Speaker 3: almost like an experiment and to see what happens when
Speaker 3: a person, given their temperament isn't, for whatever reason, isn't
Speaker 3: given the means to.
Speaker 4: Realize what.
Speaker 3: They're mattering instinct demands of.
Speaker 4: It's very hard to be a heroics driver, but it's so.
Speaker 3: Much harder to be going to be a heroics driver,
Speaker 3: not allowed to be one for whatever reason.
Speaker 2: So this illuminates the connection between mattering and mental health.
Speaker 2: Let's move to Scott Joplin. What does that story tell us, Yes, it's.
Speaker 6: Not Joplin, who was known as King Ragtime, and I
Speaker 6: don't know if you know his music, ly wonderful he
Speaker 6: has it became he was forgotten for a long time.
Speaker 3: And then this was in the seventies with what was that.
Speaker 7: Movie That's Staying Right and that that's that music is
Speaker 7: played and he was buried in a pauper's grave, and
Speaker 7: after that, you know, he was dug up and he
Speaker 7: was I think he was given a posthumous polar surprise
Speaker 7: for not for his Ragti music.
Speaker 3: He didn't take that so very seriously. He wanted to
Speaker 3: be a classical musician.
Speaker 4: And he did compose classical pieces.
Speaker 3: He composed two operas, one of which was lost and
Speaker 3: the other Tree Minitia, which has been in some sense
Speaker 3: found not with the full orchestration that he had provided,
Speaker 3: but musicians have provided the orchestration. I think marvelous. He
Speaker 3: tried to do something extraordinity. His mattering project was to
Speaker 3: bring the Black American experience.
Speaker 4: Into music and to try to create the.
Speaker 3: Highest forms of music from the African American experience.
Speaker 4: And it was in Congress it was considered ridiculous. He
Speaker 4: got He poured.
Speaker 3: Everything into this mattering project, kept perfecting it, could not
Speaker 3: get anybody to perform it. The idea of opera using
Speaker 3: the grand forms of opera from classical music, to speak
Speaker 3: of the African American experience in the United States post
Speaker 3: Civil War during reconstruction was just considered preposterous. Poured everything
Speaker 3: into it. As I said, died of pauper. He could
Speaker 3: have just kept creating his ragtime pieces, could have tried
Speaker 3: to create more popular forms of music, but to show
Speaker 3: the African American experience in its most glorious setting. This
Speaker 3: was his mattering project.
Speaker 2: So tell us about the mattering project of your of
Speaker 2: the neo Nazi skinhead that you met.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, I'm very interested in where the mannering instinct
Speaker 3: is really not being realized and many people are driven
Speaker 3: to quite horrible ideological extremes. This is very rich pickings
Speaker 3: for ideologies to go amongst those who are wanting to
Speaker 3: feel that they don't matter. And I really wanted.
Speaker 8: To talk to an inceel involuntary selibates, and I spent
Speaker 8: a lot of time online reading their message boards.
Speaker 3: And the extreme things they say, and the resentment is
Speaker 3: just boiling up because they feel that they don't matter,
Speaker 3: They're not getting what they feel they need, and they
Speaker 3: blame it on those from whom they want this young women.
Speaker 3: And I was also reading about neo Nazis and I
Speaker 3: really really wanted to get to know one. Most of
Speaker 3: them didn't answer me when I wrote to them, but
Speaker 3: there was this one who answered me. He is an
Speaker 3: ex Nazi skinhead. He grew up under terrible circumstances and
Speaker 3: the really mean streets of Philadelphia, horrific family life.
Speaker 5: His mother was a drug addict, his stepfather was a
Speaker 5: brutal ex Navy man who would eat this young man,
Speaker 5: and much so that sometimes on the way home from school,
Speaker 5: he would try to get hit by a car.
Speaker 3: And during one summer he met some neo Nazi skinheads
Speaker 3: and they were very impressed with him because he actually
Speaker 3: he actually knew that the enemy had gone to school
Speaker 3: with black kids and as they had into you know,
Speaker 3: he was a street warrior in Philadelphia. And then they
Speaker 3: told him because he really felt like he didn't matter,
Speaker 3: they really puffed him out, they flattered him, and they
Speaker 3: told him, look in the mirror, you are a white male,
Speaker 3: heterosexual American. You matter more than all these others. They
Speaker 3: are stealing You're mattering. And this is very typical of
Speaker 3: certain spheres of the mattering man to think of mannering
Speaker 3: as zero sum to the extent that others matter, they're
Speaker 3: taking away pieces of the pie from you. That is
Speaker 3: how he was telling his story in terms of the mattering,
Speaker 3: of feeling that he mattered, feeling that he was powerful,
Speaker 3: feeling that he had to make to punish those who
Speaker 3: were stealing mattering from him. It is very typical of
Speaker 3: certain areas problematic, troubling and troubled areas of the mattering
Speaker 3: that that people feel that others are stealing mattering from
Speaker 3: them and there's not enough mattering to go around. I
Speaker 3: think that's one of the big messages of the Book
Speaker 3: of ways that we could try to change things so
Speaker 3: that people would feel that there is enough mattering to
Speaker 3: go around, that the extent that any of us matter,
Speaker 3: we all matter to that same extent. I think that's
Speaker 3: the basics of ethics. He's an example of, yeah, trying
Speaker 3: to realize this deep motivation, how very wrong things can go,
Speaker 3: and he fortunately found much more creative, life fulfilling ways
Speaker 3: of meeting his instinct, which is why he was willing
Speaker 3: to talk to me.
Speaker 2: So, how do you see distorted or threatened mattering playing
Speaker 2: out in our politics or culture currently?
Speaker 4: The ways that we choose to try to realize our
Speaker 4: mattering instinct with it's religiously spiritually achievement, competition, socializing. It's
Speaker 4: so fraught for us, it's so fraught with our emotions.
Speaker 4: We're staking our lives lives on this.
Speaker 3: Uh, this is the way that we try to prove
Speaker 3: to ourselves that we are worth all the attention, but
Speaker 3: we have to give ourselves just to lead our lives.
Speaker 3: The mere fact that people are living their lives so
Speaker 3: differently can feel like an affront, you know, I experienced
Speaker 3: this very much when I was born into a very
Speaker 3: religious family, and I think I know very well what
Speaker 3: it feels like to be a religious person. I was
Speaker 3: very religious, extremely religious, until the age of twelve or thirteen,
Speaker 3: and then I know more. But I know that when
Speaker 3: people like me, i am an atheist, talk to religious people,
Speaker 3: we often kind of talk down down to them, and they,
Speaker 3: you know, we as if if only they would be rational,
Speaker 3: they would realize that their life is based on something unsubstantiated. Uh.
Speaker 3: And And for their part, you know, religious people often
Speaker 3: will talk down to people like me, like, how can
Speaker 3: we positively have any purpose in our life? How can
Speaker 3: we be moral if we don't think that the big
Speaker 3: guy up there is watching us? The reason when they
Speaker 3: were all over the Mannering map there there is this
Speaker 3: kind of adversarial uh, positioning of of people against those
Speaker 3: who who who are who are staking them mattering on
Speaker 3: something else. The scientists will talk down to the people
Speaker 3: in the humanities, the people of humanities ontown the people
Speaker 3: And besides, you know, I've experienced all these in my life,
Speaker 3: and and you know, so there is a a deep
Speaker 3: tendency across the Mannering map to universalize one's own way
Speaker 3: of going about realizing that because it means so much
Speaker 3: to us, and we're always uncertain, we don't know, we
Speaker 3: don't know if we're going about it the right way.
Speaker 3: That's a really important part of it. Why it's so
Speaker 3: for us, this uncertainty, and that makes us very defensive,
Speaker 3: which can make us very intolerant. And we certainly see
Speaker 3: this in the politics.
Speaker 2: If we're taking the mattering instincts seriously, how would this
Speaker 2: change the way that we think about our schools, our institutions,
Speaker 2: our politics. What can we do there?
Speaker 3: So I think really the first thing to do is
Speaker 3: to understand this matter, and it's how it comes about,
Speaker 3: why we have it, And I think it's rather a
Speaker 3: beautiful thing about us. We recognize because we have this
Speaker 3: great capacity for self reflection, that we can step outside
Speaker 3: of our lives and interrogate ourselves.
Speaker 4: Turn our theory of mind that.
Speaker 3: Developed in order to understand others, we can turn it
Speaker 3: on ourselves and discover things about ourselves.
Speaker 4: And one thing that is glaringly obvious it is.
Speaker 3: That we pay so much attention to ourselves constantly. We
Speaker 3: have to.
Speaker 4: We're biologically determined to be.
Speaker 3: It seem would seem that we think that we're the
Speaker 3: most important thing in the whole universe, and short of luacy,
Speaker 3: we know that we're not. I mean, we're all across
Speaker 3: the mannering map. There are different views of the values.
Speaker 3: What makes life valuable? What are the things we need
Speaker 3: to do that are valuable in order for ourselves to
Speaker 3: be valuable? You know, it makes us value seeking creature.
Speaker 3: And it's so easy nowadays to get really appalled by
Speaker 3: various things. But I always try to see it in
Speaker 3: terms of this framework, to try to understand the what's
Speaker 3: going wrong, but that it's stemming from something that I
Speaker 3: find uh moving about about all you it's the matter
Speaker 3: in the state, And so I think just to see
Speaker 3: ourselves and to see others in terms of what it
Speaker 3: is we share, it gives, you know, a deep understanding
Speaker 3: to understand is not to to accept all the bad
Speaker 3: things that it can lead to, but at least it
Speaker 3: is to understand one another and not see each other
Speaker 3: as monsters.
Speaker 2: And you have a nice quote from Spinoza on this, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: The quote that you're talking about is he says, so
Speaker 3: you know, my my aim is not to laugh at others,
Speaker 3: not to be uh, not.
Speaker 4: To to cry them.
Speaker 3: My aim is to understand, and I find that extremely
Speaker 3: inspiring and helpful. But also if we.
Speaker 4: Want to reach people who are reachable.
Speaker 3: My my ex Nazi friend calls them the wobbleys. If
Speaker 3: you want to treat them as if they matter, that's
Speaker 3: what got through to him. Don't curse them, but speak
Speaker 3: to them as if they matter. Our brains, I don't
Speaker 3: have to tell you are the most complicated thing that
Speaker 3: has been found yet in this universe.
Speaker 4: They are extremely complicated.
Speaker 3: They demand a tremendous amount of water, and so of
Speaker 3: course we pay ourselves a tremendous amount of attention. You're
Speaker 3: thinking about yourself, you're fantasizing your daydreaming about yourself, you're
Speaker 3: remembering with nostalgia. It's we are self centered and we
Speaker 3: have to be. It's biologically determined. But as I said,
Speaker 3: we have this capacity for self reflection, we can step
Speaker 3: outside of it, and that's when we become these justificatory creatures.
Speaker 3: I say, instead of being called holo sapiens, we should
Speaker 3: be called Homo eustafagants, the justifying creatures. That what's really
Speaker 3: different about us, you know, and it's not our gregariousness.
Speaker 3: Other animals are also gregarious. Other animals need deep connections
Speaker 3: because everything's more complicated in us. Not even bonobos, those
Speaker 3: wonderful cousins of ours. They don't step outside of themselves
Speaker 3: and have to justify the their way of life, say
Speaker 3: why am I worth all of this? We evolve this
Speaker 3: capacity for self reflection. That's what brings us up into
Speaker 3: this other sphere, the sphere of the sphere of values.
Speaker 3: It's not enough to just survive and flourish like the
Speaker 3: other creatures on or if we have to justify to
Speaker 3: ourselves our right to survive and flourish.
Speaker 2: So, Rebecca, if a listener felt that his or her
Speaker 2: life didn't really matter to themselves or to other people,
Speaker 2: what would you say to them after having written this book?
Speaker 4: We really do all matter.
Speaker 3: I think that's what we're talking about when we talk
Speaker 3: about the intrinsic dignity of the human So people really
Speaker 3: do need some kind of mattering project. Whether they collapse
Speaker 3: it into their need for connectedness, or if they have
Speaker 3: such a temperament that they need other things. I think
Speaker 3: that they should first of all, you know, really think
Speaker 3: about what it is that would make them feel that
Speaker 3: they matter.
Speaker 4: Is it closer connections with others might be? Is it
Speaker 4: some sort of creative outlet might be. Maybe it's a spirituality.
Speaker 4: It's hard to be human.
Speaker 2: That was my interview with Rebecca Goldstein. I want to
Speaker 2: return to the idea at the center of today's conversation
Speaker 2: that every one of us is running a mattering project
Speaker 2: to be seen, to be needed, to be effective, to
Speaker 2: weigh something in the world. Rebecca argues that this is
Speaker 2: the deep engine that lies below our decisions, below our identities,
Speaker 2: our conflicts, our cooperation. So we just talked about how
Speaker 2: this mattering instinct draws a kind of inner cartography that
Speaker 2: tells you what counts and what doesn't. And we saw
Speaker 2: through a few stories from her book how different these
Speaker 2: maps can be. For Scott Joplin, his map placed a
Speaker 2: huge red circle around an opera that the world generally ignored.
Speaker 2: For William James, mattering was intertwined with mental survival, clawing
Speaker 2: his way out of despair, deciding that his choices could
Speaker 2: make a difference, that his life could be something other
Speaker 2: than a footnote. For the former skinhead, mattering initially meant
Speaker 2: inflicting harm to feel stronger, and then later redrawing his
Speaker 2: map to realize that significance doesn't have to be stolen
Speaker 2: from other people. Those very different lives, but they're all
Speaker 2: shaped by the common question of what has to be.
Speaker 1: True for me to feel that eye matter.
Speaker 2: Eral science point of view, this is a question about circuitry,
Speaker 2: how our systems of reward and fear and social belonging
Speaker 2: get trained over time. From Rebecca's philosophical point of view,
Speaker 2: it's about value and meaning, what we treat as real,
Speaker 2: as precious, as worth sacrifice. And the hope is that
Speaker 2: when we put those views together we can get more
Speaker 2: traction on understanding ourselves and our current moment. So I
Speaker 2: want to return to that line from the philosopher Borus Spinoza,
Speaker 2: the line that Rebecca loves.
Speaker 1: What Spinoza wrote is quote, I.
Speaker 2: Have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail,
Speaker 2: not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. What
Speaker 2: he's saying here is that instead of reacting with laughter
Speaker 2: or tears or hate, one can undertake a calm, rational
Speaker 2: inquiry to grasp the cause is behind human behaviors and events,
Speaker 2: viewing them as natural consequences. Spinoza was making a call
Speaker 2: for intellectual clarity and emotional detachment to comprehend the world,
Speaker 2: and that was a hallmark of his rationalist philosophy. So
Speaker 2: the key call for us here is to try to
Speaker 2: understand how different people run different mattering projects. This gives
Speaker 2: us a different starting point than we usually take. Instead
Speaker 2: of asking how can anybody believe that, we can ask
Speaker 2: what does this person believe they need in order to matter?
Speaker 2: And here's a small experiment that you might try after
Speaker 2: this episode. Notice your own mattering map. When you get
Speaker 2: defensive in an argument, or when you feel invisible at work,
Speaker 2: or when you're strangely proud of something tiny, ask what
Speaker 2: part of my mattering is being threatened or affirmed right now? Well,
Speaker 2: so do this also with someone that you maybe find infuriating,
Speaker 2: Ask what mattering project is their behavior serving? You might
Speaker 2: not love the answer, but it can shift you out
Speaker 2: of scorn into a stance closer to understanding. The point
Speaker 2: is to recognize that beneath all the surface differences, political
Speaker 2: and cultural and personal, there's a universally shared architecture a
Speaker 2: brain that needs to register to count, to feel that
Speaker 2: this brief candle leaves some kind of trace.
Speaker 1: If we can see that if we can.
Speaker 2: Talk about mattering as much as we talk about stress,
Speaker 2: or diet or sleep, we might be able to redesign
Speaker 2: our interactions in ways that take this into account and
Speaker 2: to each of us, the invitation from this conversation is
Speaker 2: to participate in that process a bit more consciously, to ask,
Speaker 2: how do I want to matter and to whom? Go
Speaker 2: to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
Speaker 2: to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my
Speaker 2: substack and check out Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube
Speaker 2: for videos of each episode and to leave comments until
Speaker 2: next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos