The Story of Stories

The human drive for explanations

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 2,000 years ago, in ancient Greece, a local ruler had a problem. He suspected his new crown wasn't made of solid gold, but he couldn't prove it.

0:16So he asked the kingdom's most famous mathematician, Archimedes, to investigate. While pondering the puzzle, Archimedes took a bath. He filled the tub to the brim, and as he stepped in, the water overflowed.

0:36Archimedes had a flash of insight. The water that spilled out of the bath reflected the volume of his own body. He realized that if he put the crown into water, he could measure its volume by seeing how much water was displaced. He could use this to tell the difference between a crown made of pure gold and one that had impurities.

1:01He was so excited with his discovery that he leaped out of the tub and ran naked through the streets, shouting, Eureka! Eureka! Which is Greek for, I found it! I found it! The famous story of the Eureka moment may or may not have happened. It was written 200 years after Archimedes died. But it says something profound about our minds. A good explanation gives us pleasure. And when we cannot come up with a good explanation,

1:33we feel dissatisfied. Something in the human mind yearns to make sense of the world. Some researchers think this sense-making drive is a basic human impulse, no different than thirst or hunger.

1:52This week on Hidden Brain, why our minds seek to explain the world and how the stories we tell ourselves can lead to discovery, delight, and disaster. Why is my friend late?

2:23How does nuclear fission work? What exactly is happening when I sneeze? Human beings have an endless number of questions. At Princeton University, psychologist Tanya Lombroso is interested in why we come up with all these questions and how our drive to make sense of the world reveals something fundamental about our minds.

Tanya Lombroso on toddler mysteries

2:44Tanya Lombroso, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me. Tanya, I want to start with a personal mystery you once encountered in your own life. Your toddler returned home from preschool one day wearing different pants than the ones she wore in the morning. Tell me how the rest of this mystery unfolded. So that observation in itself wasn't so surprising. Toddlers have accidents of all kinds all the time, and so it was pretty familiar that you might have different pants because your potty-training child might have had an accident.

3:15But at this point, my toddler had been very well potty-trained for months and hadn't had an accident. And so on Monday, this was a little surprising. But it was even more surprising when we went back to pick her up on Tuesday and found, again, that she had different pants on and had another accident. And then on Wednesday, and then on Thursday. So I found the teacher and said, what's going on? She was perfectly potty-trained. What happened? And the teacher explained that on Monday, she'd made an interesting observation that the girls peed sitting down,

3:47but the boys peed standing up, and she'd thought to herself, I want to learn how to do that too. And so all week, she had been practicing peeing standing up. Now, this is a really charming story, but I want to draw your attention to Tanya's thought process as the week unfolded. On Monday, when her child came home wearing different pants, she came up with one explanation. Her daughter had had an accident. But when the same thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, Tanya came up with a different explanation.

4:17Maybe her daughter was regressing on her potty training. Finally, when the teacher explained what was going on, Tanya now had one simple story that unified and explained everything. As a researcher, Tanya is fascinated by how our minds yearn for such stories and explanations and what happens when we can't find them. And one very mundane example that I can think of is the experience I had when I was trying to find parking as a professor at Berkeley, where I taught for many years.

4:49And people who live in the area know that parking can be a challenge. And so I would develop all of these pet theories that maybe if it was noon on a Tuesday, then this particular parking lot was probably a good place to park. Because at noon, I bet the law school professors go out to lunch. But the engineers, they probably don't go out to lunch. So I shouldn't try the lot by engineering. And so I would develop these pet theories to try to figure out what was going on. And perhaps a given pet theory would work for a week or two. But then by week three, it no longer worked.

5:20And I had to say, maybe there's not much patterns here. Maybe I'm picking up on noise. You cite the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who once said that humans were primates who tell stories. What's the connection between the world of stories and the world of explanations? I think both stories and explanations are ways that we really try to make sense of or understand the world around us. The way I think about them is they're sort of two ends of a continuum. You know, a good story is one that's full of detail and creates visual images and emotions.

5:53A good explanation tends to be a bit more abstract. It might appeal to general features of the world. If you're thinking about science, it might appeal to scientific laws or regularities. And I think if you look at everyday cases of explanation, we do a mix of storytelling and appealing to these more general features of the world. So for example, if you see a friend arrive late to work and you say, why were you late to work? The friend might appeal to some general ideas, like there was traffic.

6:24But she might also tell you how she woke up five minutes later than she intended to, and then she was rushed, and then she burnt her toast. All of these very concrete details that really help you understand from her perspective what her morning was like and why she's in the emotional state that she's in, and so on. So I think often we do both of these. We do the storytelling, which is very concrete and particular, and we do the explaining, which is much more about extracting the structure of the world in a way that's generalizable.

6:55And when you say extracting the structure of the world in a way that's generalizable, what I'm getting from you is that explanations and to some extent stories as well are about constructing models for the world. They allow us to cut through confusion, to distill complexity into simplicity. Yes. I think part of what explanations do is that they relate our observations, which are highly variable, changing from moment to moment, to something more like a simple underlying structure that allows us to predict

7:26how things might go in the future. It's a way to try to extract order and regularity from what might otherwise seem disorganized and unsettling.

7:37The more Tanya thought about it, the more she realized that our capacity for explanations needed to be studied carefully. Our drive for explanation itself needed explanation. For instance, there are times when this drive can make us curious, help us discover new things. But there are other times when our hunger for a simple story can make us leap to conclusions and become less curious. So an everyday example of this

8:09that might be familiar to people is the experience of interviewing someone for a position. When we interview people, often, I think, even without realizing it, we construct a whole story about the kind of person this is and how they're going to do in the job and how they fit into what we're looking for. And that's one kind of evidence that we might use for deciding who to hire. But then we also have things like their resume and their letters of reference. And perhaps we tend to over-rely on our own story that we construct and under-rely on these other sources of evidence

8:41that may or may not fit into our story so nicely. So this is not just saying that explanations are sort of deductions we draw from the world. It's really saying that explanations are the way we actually see the world. We actually see the world through the explanations and models we build of the world. One way to think about it is that explanations are the currency in which we understand things. We're presented with all sorts of information, but we need to do something with it. And the way we do something with it is to construct some sort of a model, an explanatory model, one that we find explanatorily satisfying.

9:13And that's what we use as a basis for thinking and reasoning. Well, we'll talk soon about the experiments that you've conducted to analyze our capacity for explanation. But I want to start with a story that illustrates so much about our drive for explanation. You once drew a link between your daughter's personality and what you knew about her before she was born. Can you explain, Tanya? Sure. So when I was pregnant with my first daughter, I discovered around seven months into the pregnancy that she was breached.

9:43For those of you who haven't gone through this process and aren't familiar with it, that just basically means her head was up rather than down. And that's not where you want it to be before birth. And so being a good scientist, I did all sorts of research on how she might be able to turn around and the probability that she would turn around before birth and so on. But in fact, she was very comfortable in just the position she was and did not turn around prior to birth. This daughter is now 10 and we still joke that this illustrates her wonderful persistence

10:14and stubbornness. You know, she's very steadfast in the best way that I think will make her an amazing adult and sometimes frustrating child.

10:24You know, of course, on some level, I don't really think there is a connection between her having been in a breech position before she was born and her being a persistent, stubborn child later. But it's so tempting to draw these connections and to see these patterns and to try to make sense of what we observe now in terms of what we know about the past.

10:50And what I love about this is it shows how indiscriminate we are in coming up with explanations for things that otherwise feel inexplicable. I think that's right. I think very often the world presents us with ambiguity and what we do is we try to connect the dots in a way that tells a compelling narrative and that allows us to have a sense that there is order.

11:16When we come back, we look at the great benefits and the great dangers that are contained in our drive to explain the world. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Thank you.

Reverse engineering everyday behavior

11:34This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you were a kid, you probably asked a very important question all the time. Why? Why are there clouds? Why does water boil? Why do I sneeze? If you're a grown-up, you might still ask why even though the questions might be different. Why is my colleague late? Why does my dog seem sad? Why is my neighbor more successful than I am?

12:05At Princeton University, psychologist Tanya Lombroso studies our powerful drive to understand what is happening, to explain the world, and what our search for explanations can reveal about us. Tanya, your father was trained as an electrical engineer and during business trips to Japan, he would sometimes bring back mysterious little electronic gifts for you to play with. Tell me what you did with them and the connection that you have made between that childhood experience and your research today as a scientist.

12:36Well, my father had a rule when he came back with these mysterious gifts, which was that if my brother and I could figure out how they worked, we could keep them. And this was a challenge because everything was in Japanese and often they were very unfamiliar. I remember one time he brought back something which we eventually discovered was an alarm clock, but it had a series of numbers arrayed on one side and numbers on the other side and lots of little switches for each of the numbers. And so with the right combination of numbers, you could sort of specify what time you wanted it to sound.

13:08And so what we had to do was basically look at the features of these artifacts, try to figure out what different buttons they did, think about why someone might have designed it in that particular way, right? What might it be for given that it was designed in this particular way? And that sort of process of reverse engineering, of looking at something's behavior, what it looks like, how it behaves, and then trying to think backwards to what its function must be such that you can understand why it has those properties. That's very much

13:39what a psychologist does, looking at human behavior and then trying to figure out why the mind works the way it does.

13:51Tanya doesn't just do this with other people's minds. She does it with her own. For example, she once woke up in the middle of the night because she heard some mysterious sounds. Of course, she did what any of us would do in that situation. She looked for an explanation.

14:09So this was when my daughter was probably around three and my mother was visiting. And when I heard noise, I went outside of my bedroom door and I found my mother and my daughter sitting in the dark, having a full-blown tea party with stuffed animals around the table and pretend cake and so on. So I was very puzzled. I also know that my mother would prefer to be sleeping at 3 a.m. So how had this happened? This seemed to be something that called out for explanation. And what did you find out?

14:43What was behind it? What I discovered was that my daughter had woken up and was very enthusiastic that her grandmother was visiting. So went straight downstairs to wake up my mother. And when my mother was woken up, she didn't think it was strange that it was dark because my daughter often woke up before the sun came up. So she just thought it was morning. Now, you could just say at this point, this is unacceptable. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. Go back to bed.

15:13Send them both back to bed and go back to sleep. But in some ways, that was inadequate for you. You actually wanted to know why they were there. It was important to you for you to find out. Explaining what happened is actually really important to knowing what the correct response is to the thing that you're seeing. Absolutely. I think it's also very important to being able to anticipate when it will happen again, to being able to bring it about more or to prevent it, depending on whether it's an outcome that we want or prefer to avoid. So I think that there's a lot we get out

15:43of an explanation for an event, especially when it involves people and concerns about responsibility and blame. Then knowing exactly why someone acted the way they did is incredibly important. We talked earlier about the value that explanations provide us in terms of producing a world that is more predictable. Can you talk about this idea a little more? I'm thinking about the world of sports. Good combination of attacking and defending from both guys. If you understand the strategy an opponent is using,

16:14not just sort of responding to whatever your opponent is doing in the moment, but understand the strategy behind your opponent's actions, it becomes much easier to compete and much easier to win. That's a great example. I will confess I do not understand the world of sports. So I will take your word for it, but that makes sense. But I think it's generally the case. I mean, if you think about trying to anticipate somebody's behavior, right, perhaps you have an arch nemesis and you're trying to anticipate their next move. If you understand what's motivating them, why are they acting the way they are?

16:44What's their goal? If you have answers to those questions, you'll be in a much better position to anticipate what they're going to do and potentially to prevent it. And as I was reading your work, I was realizing that, you know, we don't just benefit from the explanations that we discover. We benefit from the explanations of many human beings who came before us. I mean, you might even argue that culture is a mechanism to transmit explanations from one generation to the next.

17:15Absolutely. I think typically when we think about learning from explanations, what we have in mind is learning from the explanations that we receive from other people or from books. I think it's perhaps less recognized but equally important that we also learn by trying to get explanations ourselves.

17:34Sometimes that motivates us to get evidence and make new observations, but sometimes we can learn something new just by trying to explain to ourselves. There's a phenomenon called the self-explanation effect that I think most people have probably experienced, and that's the experience of coming to understand something better as a result of trying to explain it to yourself or to somebody else. Part of what's sort of mysterious and amazing about the phenomenon is that that's a kind of learning that occurs even though you're not getting new information from anybody else

18:05or from the external world. You're just rearranging and scrutinizing what's already in your head. And in the course of doing that, you can sometimes have one of these aha moments and come to realize that you understand something better. Or sometimes come to realize that you thought you understood something, but that there's actually an important gap in your knowledge that you need to fill.

The illusion of explanatory depth

18:29One of the reasons for this is something called the illusion of explanatory depth. And you hinted at this just a second ago. Can you unpack what that idea is, Tanya? Yeah, absolutely. Many of us feel like we understand how a lot of the devices in our everyday life work. We understand how a bicycle works. We understand how a microwave works, how a zipper works, and so on. If you ask people, they'll typically say, yeah, I understand how a zipper works. And then you say, okay, can you please explain it?

19:00And what happens when people actually try to explain something like how a zipper works is they start to appreciate all of the ways in which maybe they really don't have the full story of how a zipper works. and the process of trying to generate a good explanation helps us appreciate that we're really falling short. I've seen experiments where you ask people to draw a bicycle, for example, and people will draw a chain that connects the two wheels of the bicycle together, which, of course, would make the bicycle

19:30impossible to actually ride. And you realize very quickly that even when it comes to extremely basic things, we might actually not understand very well how they work, but it actually requires us to be put on the spot to be able to reveal this gap in our knowledge. That's right. Psychologists sometimes talk about what's called metacognition, which is sort of our cognition about our own cognition. And this is the case where our metacognition is often wrong. We often think we know something that we actually don't know. And in the process of trying to explain it,

20:01we can get better calibrated and appreciate what we do when we don't know. I think that's one of the reasons trying to explain can be really powerful. But I think in other cases it can also actually help you not just recognize gaps, but even fill them. Tanya cites a scene from the PBS TV series Beecham House. It's set in India in the late 18th century. An Englishman has been accused of having stolen from the emperor and he's put in a jail cell. And so he's in his jail cell

20:31trying to explain to himself how this happened. And he's thinking to himself, you know, who could have betrayed me? Why would they have betrayed me? How could the emperor have known where the stolen property was in my house and so on? And from that jail cell, he doesn't get any new information. He doesn't have any new piece of evidence. And yet, just thinking it through and thinking about all of the pieces of evidence he already had allows him to have the aha moment where he realizes

21:02who has betrayed him. With this new insight, the Englishman confronts the true perpetrator of the crime. You know there are innumerable candidates. I have arrived at one simple question. Who had the most to gain?

21:19I realize now you did not meet my mother by chance at the Doxing, Calcutta. You were there by design. You knew exactly where she was going and when she would leave. You'd probably be monitoring her for months.

21:37So, sometimes we learn by getting new evidence or by asking other people. But sometimes we learn just by thinking about things in the right way. It's a process I refer to as learning by thinking. In this case, learning by trying to explain to yourself. You know, some time ago on Hidden Brain, we spoke with the researcher Vera Tobin. She studies the techniques that storytellers use to take advantage of our cognitive systems and she said something that is very close to what you just told me a second ago. I want to play you a short clip of what she said. What a story can do for you is construct this

22:09insight experience where you feel not that something has blindsided you or that you were just taken by surprise but this experience that feels as if you have a real aha moment about how things fit together and that is something that humans like a lot. So the two things that jump out at me when I hear Vera say that, Tanya, is that storytellers are doing two things. One, they're actually constructing a story that has mystery and confusion and uncertainty built into it

22:39and because we find those things aversive, it actually serves as a hook that keeps us listening, keeps us watching, keeps us reading and then when the explanation is provided, it provides us with this burst of pleasure because we suddenly understand that the mystery is resolved, the puzzle is solved. Yes, I love that example and I would also add that science can often have that character as well. So in the case of a good story, there's an author crafting the story to have just the right form but I think part of what makes science very satisfying is that some of the time we get that experience

23:10as well of having all of these clues and then getting the satisfying theory that makes all of those clues fit together in a way that makes sense. I want to talk a moment about situations where explanations do not feel pleasurable. We've all had the experience of watching a magic trick and being amazed and then discovering the explanation behind the trick and invariably this does not produce wonder but it produces disappointment.

23:40Something that in fact appeared wondrous turns out to be, you know, pedestrian. What do you think this reveals about the explanatory system in the brain? One thing that I think it tells us is that there might be cases where we actually find uncertainty and mystery and awe somewhat pleasurable. I think if you think about an emotion like awe it has possibly a kind of negative tinge, right? It can be kind of scary to have uncertainty and not understand something but there's also a way

24:10in which it can be pleasurable. It tells us there's something to learn here. Here's something that's worth paying attention to. So when we have something that seems to defy the laws of physics or the laws of probability and it turns out it was just something completely mundane, I think there's a violation between our sense that there was something really amazing to be learned or discovered and then the reality that actually it was just business as usual.

24:42So one thing that we find is that people are more curious about the answers to questions about science than about religion. They think that we should answer science questions more than we should answer questions about religion. If I ask you why is rust red and I say it's a mystery that just seems wrong but if I say why does God exist it's a mystery why did Jesus walk on water it's a mystery for a lot of questions about religion it's not just that we don't know

25:12it's that we seem to be much more comfortable with the idea that we can't know and perhaps that we shouldn't know. And what do you think spells the difference? Why is it that for some things we actually think that it's unacceptable that you tell me that there's no answer to this and for other things I feel like it's unacceptable that you tell me that there is an answer to it? I think there's a few factors in play. I think one of them is that our beliefs play all sorts of different kinds of roles for us.

25:42One reason that we have the beliefs that we do and that we aspire to have particular kinds of beliefs is because we want to be accurate and represent the world in a way that will give us a model that allows us to predict what will happen but our beliefs also play important social roles. They play important moral roles. They play important personal roles and I think sometimes in a case like religion or relationships to particular people or institutions demanding an explanation might compete with other kinds of goals related to relationships and trust. We also have evidence

26:13that there are some cases where people are uncomfortable with the idea that science could fully explain the human mind. So for example people seem to in general be very comfortable thinking that science could explain why we forget things or how stereo vision works or how motor control works but they're much less comfortable with the idea that science could explain our religious beliefs or our moral behavior or spiritual experience or appreciation for art. So all of these phenomena are phenomena that we have a rich internal experience

26:46that we feel like we have special access to as the person who is experiencing them and for those phenomena it also seems like people think there might be a sort of threat to the idea that somebody outside of our own mind who isn't having those rich personal experiences could provide a full explanation.

27:05I'm wondering tell me what you think of this hypothesis that part of what we're doing when we're trying to explain things is we're trying to make the outside world comprehensible to the inside world but there are things in the inside world that already feel comprehensible to us and for those things an explanation from the outside does not feel welcome but it actually feels like an intrusion. I think that's a really interesting idea. As a psychologist of course I want to resist that because my job is precisely explaining the internal world but I think

27:36what you describe is capturing something of many people's experience. sometimes people talk about the idea that we are intuitive dualists like Descartes we think of the mind as somehow fundamentally separate from the body and so part of what's going on in some of these cases I think is that by trying to give an external or scientific explanation to our internal experience we are crossing those levels in an uncomfortable way we're trying to explain aspects of the mental by appeal to aspects of the biological or the physical.

28:09When we come back how our drive for explanations can sometimes lead to disaster. You're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam.

When explanations lead us astray

28:35This is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam. Human beings seem to possess an innate drive to come up with explanations for things. This drive makes us curious helps us discover things but as much as our capacity for explanation is impressive and useful psychologist Tanya Lombroso has also found there are important ways in which this drive can lead us astray.

29:00Tanya some years ago researchers from the University of Wisconsin had kids listen