Changing Our Mental Maps

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In February 2024, two German tourists visited Australia. During one section of their trip in Queensland, they turned off the main road on the advice of Google Maps.

They figured that the road up ahead was closed because of a rising river and the detour would take them to their destination. As one of them put it later, they trusted the map. We decided, OK, let's follow Google Maps

because Google Maps knows maybe more than we know. The tourists told an Australian TV station and other media that they took a dirt path known as the Langhi track. At first, things looked fine.

Their off-road vehicle seemed up for the terrain. But about 40 miles in, the four-wheel drive Nissan Navara got bogged down. Its wheels sank into the mud.

The Germans were stuck, and they found they couldn't reach anyone for help. Recognizing they were in serious trouble, they decided to abandon their vehicle and trek back in the direction they'd come.

I feel like in a movie, like in a bad movie, we tried to build our shelter, but that didn't work really well. So we slept like under the sky. Rain poured down on them.

They had to watch out for pigs and snakes and crocodiles. The 40-mile journey took several days. The tourists made it back safely. Rangers later helped them retrieve their vehicle.

But they had learned an important lesson. A map that's wrong can sometimes be worse than no map at all. Today, we explore the maps inside our own heads. What happens when these maps, which we have constructed ourselves, turn out to be inaccurate,

and how we can rediscover the path forward? Misdirection, Minds, and Maps. This week, on Hidden Brain. The End

Ifolore.fi Yeah, but what's your advantage on you? All right, I'm going to get 4,000 years old. Theallisuusliiton is paying for itself to the same time.

Tutu the value of the population. Theallisuusliitto. Theallisuusliitto. Theallisuusliitto.

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Theallisuusliitto. Lue lisää Lähitapiola.fi. Palveluntarjoajat. Lähitapiolan alueyhtiöt. Lähitapiola. Samalla puolella. It's human nature to make plans, to generate expectations, to imagine how things will go.

But life often has other plans in store for us. What happens then? Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. Over many years, he has studied how we plan for the future

and what happens when our plans are derailed. Norman Farb, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks so much, Shankar. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Norm, your maternal grandparents were born in Poland. They were Jewish, and they experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. After surviving the concentration camps, they moved to Canada to start a new life.

They knew what they wanted for their daughter. This is your mother, Linda. Tell me about the world your grandparents constructed for her. Yeah, so they wanted things to be very safe for their children, as you might imagine.

There's literally no extended family. They're the sole survivors of both their family trees. For their daughter, they brought with them the somewhat kind of antiquated view that her job was to be a really good girl growing up, be a help to her mother, and then find

someone to marry and manage households. And I think she really internalized that. If she just was a good girl and married a nice man and had a good household, then life would turn out just great for her and she would be happy.

Linda's life didn't turn out the way her parents imagined. She and Norm's father fought. I remember growing up in a period where there would be calm but then also really stormy periods where my parents were fighting a lot

and ultimately that led to their divorce right around the time I left for university and by the time I was done my undergraduate days my parents had completely split and my mother was living on her own This was a catastrophic change in the narrative that she expected for herself

talk about that i mean she was raised with the notion that if she was a good daughter a good wife a good mother that was the the responsibility she had and in turn she would be looked after she had she would have security she would have stability and in some ways she had done her part but life had not responded in the way that she thought it would exactly so for her there was

this massive disruption of the story she expected for herself and for the way her life unfolded. And she lapsed into a deep depression. So she would tell me in these phone calls that she felt like, you know, it was just unbelievable that her life had turned out this way. We would talk on average once a week and go into these really deep soul-searching conversations

where she tried to explain to me why she didn't deserve this, that someone was supposed to take care of her and what was going to happen to her now. Often she'd be in tears.

So really emotionally dysregulated and upset and sad. And with that sadness was this urge to make sense of what had happened, that she had done her best, but it wasn't good enough, and it was unfair and just really unreasonable.

It was just so almost incomprehensible that life had turned out this way, almost like an unwillingness to accept that she was now single and living on her own and isolated.

So by this point, you had started to study psychology. So you were learning about ideas, about the mind and the brain. And I'm wondering, did you try and share with her

the things that you were learning, the models you were learning about human behavior? I've been studying a lot of things around existentialism and people negotiating their own meaning in life on the philosophy side. And I've been studying psychology and about how people make meanings for themselves and how much we

construct our own narratives of our lives. So I would try to reason with her and say, okay, these things happen, but can we see from a practical point of view that the more time you spend rehearsing all of these hurts, these slings and arrows from the past, the more you end up