How to Make a Difference: Part 2

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

If you look down the history of the world, you see a pattern repeat itself over and over again.

For lengthy periods of time, groups, communities, and even nations can find themselves stuck. Years go by, sometimes decades, even centuries, and nothing shifts.

And then a small group of people, sometimes even just one or two, decide they've had enough and start to foment change.

At first, it looks impossible. The odds are too steep, the opposition too strong.

But then the impossible happens, and soon after, the change that seemed impossible appears like it was inevitable.

In our story last week, we explored the psychology of learned helplessness. When people are shown over and over that they cannot change their lives or circumstances, they eventually stop trying to bring about change in their lives and circumstances.

If you missed that story, you can find it in our podcast feed, or at hiddenbrain.org. It's titled "How to Make a Difference, Part One." Today, we look at the psychology of people who bring about change in their own lives or at the level of groups and nations. What prompts these brave souls to attempt to change their circumstances even when it looks difficult or impossible?

The evidence suggests that these individuals possess a powerful weapon. They have an internal sense of agency. By believing that change is possible, by believing that they can be agents of change, they create a force field that actually makes change possible.

Today on the show, we explore research that shows that a capacity for agency is not a personality trait, but a skill that can be taught and learned. If we can learn to be helpless, apathetic, and passive, we can also learn to be optimistic and agentic.

The surprising science of how people come to see opportunity where others see only roadblocks—this week on Hidden Brain.

SV TAPE: SEGMENT A

When we think about success, we usually focus on ingredients like talent, intelligence, and opportunity. But psychologists have found that another factor matters just as much or even more. Before we ever take action, we carry around assumptions about whether our actions can make a difference. Those assumptions can determine whether we persist and adapt or never make an attempt in the first place.

At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman studies how people can learn to be more agentic.

Marty Seligman, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Martin Seligman: I'm delighted to be here.

SV TAPE: Marty, in your early days as a professor, you had a brilliant student whom you call Suzanne. Describe her for me and tell me how she responded when you placed a significant challenge before her.

Martin Seligman: in my earliest years as a professor, my policy with students generally has been, after they've shown they were A-plus students in my courses, is to treat them as a postdoc graduate student and give them really difficult problems. So this happened with, uh, one of my terrific students, I'll call her Suzanne. And, uh, she started to work on the problem, and eventually I saw her with her head in her hands, crying, sobbing.

She had given up. It was too hard for her. Well, my thinking at the time was, well, what did psychology tell us about giving up and how we can get rid of it? And this is indeed, in many ways, the start of the arc of my 60 years of work, which started with helplessness and giving up, but halfway through became the opposite question. How do we make people more agentic and happier?

SV TAPE: In many ways, uh, Suzanne's example is not the example of someone who was lazy or incompetent because in some ways she had demonstrated that she was a good student in, in, in your class previously. And so it must have been a little puzzling when you saw her suddenly throw up her hands and give up, because in some ways, this was not the giving up of someone who truly was unable to do the problem. It was somebody who had given up almost before they started.

Martin Seligman: If you have the talent of Mozart but you don't believe you can compose music, the result is zero. But psychology at that time had three huge blind spots about, uh, human beings, which made it impossible to ask questions about helplessness and mastery.

The first blind spot was misery versus happiness. So psychology was entirely about the relief of misery. Uh, but when you lie in bed at night, you're not thinking about having to go from minus eight to minus three. You're thinking about happiness, doing better, how to go from plus two to plus five. Psychology didn't have a science of going from plus two to plus five.

The second blind spot was determinism, and that we were puppets of the environment, and that notions like deliberation, choice, and preference made no sense. And the third blind spot was thinking itself. So it wasn't until the 21st century with positive psychology and cognitive psychology that psychology began to work constructively on happiness, on freedom and choice, and on cognition.

Uh, I couldn't deal with Suzanne in 1969, but now psychology can deal with a Mozart who has the talent but believes that he can't compose music.

During that early part of Marty’s career, he learned about a research project that had been carried out in a nursing home. The facility was planning to redecorate a floor that served patients with developmental disabilities. It moved the residents down to the first floor. The change made a striking difference for a particular resident.

SV TAPE: And they moved her down, and on the first floor, there were a lot of things you could do, and suddenly for the first time, she started to blossom. She spoke for the first time. Uh, she helped in the cooking.

About two weeks later, the third floor redecoration was complete. The woman and the other patients who had been moved to the first floor moved back to the original rooms.

She immediately died within a few days. And this inspired, uh, Ellen Langer and Judy Rodin to see what was really going on. Now, in the background, we had discovered learned helplessness in people and animals, and we had the first indications that helplessness made you ill, that it took away from you physically.

So here's what Judy and Ellen did. Uh, they went to one floor of a nursing home and, they gave a speech to all the residents, and it was of the form, "We want you to find out about all the things you can do for yourself at Shady Grove. You can choose whether or not to go to the movies on Tuesday night or Thursday night. You can choose whether or not to have lunch at 1:00 or 2:00. “Uh, here's a group of plants. Pick out a plant, but you take care of it and water it." On the first floor of the nursing home, they gave a different speech. "We want you to know all the things we're gonna do for you here at Shady Grove. Tuesday night is movie night, lunch is at 1:00, and the nurse is gonna pick out a plant which will be nice in your room, but she's gonna water it." Then they did two things. This was back in the days when psychology was done with paperclips and rubber bands. we didn't have motion detectors. They put on white adhesive tape on the wheelchair, and over two weeks they measured how dirty it got, which was the motion detector. But most importantly, they measured death. And they found that a statistically larger sample of people died on the first floor than on the third floor. And they found that on the third floor, there was motion. People did things. The adhesive tape was black. And this opened the field of the positive psychology of health.

SV TAPE: I mean, in some ways it's striking because the options that people had at the nursing home on the third floor and the first floor were actually the same. I mean, people had plants, there were, there were movies, there was food to eat. But the difference was that the people on the third floor had choice, and they were told, "You not only have choice, but you have responsibility.

You have to take care of this plant, and if you don't take care of the plant, the plant's gonna die." And on the first floor, they had all the things. They had a beautiful plant in the room, but things were being done for them almost out of, you could argue, love. But you could argue that this love was misplaced because the people on the third floor ended up doing much better because they had agency, they had options, they had choice.

Martin Seligman: Notice there are two things going on between the first floor and the third floor. Is it the presence of agency that increases well-being, health, and activity? Or is it the absence of agency, helplessness, that kills you? It's taken, 60 years to unravel that puzzle.

So what we thought for the first 40 years was that the crucial thing was that helplessness killed you. But could it have been the opposite? That it was mastery that saved your life, and that helplessness is a default response. And the great work of Steve Maier in the last 25 years discovered that we were wrong about learned helplessness.

SV TAPE: And wrong in the sense that really it was the presence of agency that was making the difference, not the presence of helplessness that was making things worse.

Martin Seligman: Yes. Steve was able to find out through a brilliant series of neuroscience experiments that the active force was the learning of agency, not the learning of helplessness.

SV TAPE: The most powerful obstacles are not always the ones we can see. The most dangerous oppressors are not the ones holding guns to our head. Sometimes the greatest barrier to change is our own conviction that nothing we do can alter the outcome. There is no battle to be won or lost—because we've thrown in the towel before the battle even begins.

When we come back, strategies for strengthening the belief that our actions can make a difference.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Many of us assume that when a discouraging thought pops into our minds, it's telling us the truth. "This won't work. I'm not cut out for this. It's too hard."

But what if those thoughts are less like facts and more like hypotheses, stories our minds have learned to tell?

Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the science of human flourishing.

Marty, in our companion episode last week, we talked about the power of our explanatory styles.

Let's go over that one more time. What are explanatory styles?

Martin Seligman: Explanatory styles are the reflexive automatic ways that you think about the causes of adversity that happens to you. And so, for example, uh, if you're rejected by your girlfriend, you might think, "I'm unlovable." On the other hand, you might think, uh, "She's a horrible (expletive bleeped).."

Uh, well, the consequences are very different of what you think. In both cases, you've been rejected by someone you love, but in one case, she's a horrible (expletive bleeped), uh, you search for love again. In the other case, “I'm unlovable,” you give up and become helpless. And it was that observation that got me interested in optimism, and indeed I spent 30 years of my life working on the question of how you build optimism.

SV TAPE: Hmm. Marty, you say that one way to cultivate our sense of agency is to shift our explanatory style away from the tendency to catastrophize. Can you unpack that idea for me?

Martin Seligman: Uh, yes. very importantly, for good evolutionary reason, we are catastrophizers, and here's the reason. Uh, the last major geological age was the, the ice ages, the Pleistocene. And those of our ancestors who said, "It's a gorgeous day in Philadelphia today. I'll bet it's gonna be gorgeous tomorrow," got crushed by the ice. Uh, those of our ancestors who said, "It's a nice day in Philadelphia today, but it's an illusion. The ice is coming, uh, drought is coming, flood is coming, disease is coming," lived and passed on their genes.

So we inherited a brain that automatically goes to catastrophization. We are by nature catastrophizers and pessimists. So the question is, well, what can you do about a brain that is always telling you the most catastrophic interpretation? one of the potent exercises is, put it in perspective. Uh, noon on Friday, you get a message from your manager, "Please come see me at 4:00." What do you think?

SV TAPE: I'm gonna get fired.

Martin Seligman: I'm gonna get fired. This is it. How do you counter that catastrophic explanation? So here's what we do systematically. First, we have people get in touch with their catastrophic brain. Tell me the very worst thing that could happen. Well, she read my memo about the marketing campaign, she hates it, and I'm gonna be fired.

Okay. Now, tell me the very best thing that could happen at 4:00. She read the memo. She loved it. I'm gonna be promoted. I'm getting a raise. Okay. Now tell me the most realistic thing that's likely to happen. Well, she read the memo. She had reservations about my budget, which was probably overly optimistic, and she's likely to say she likes the basic idea, but she's gonna make major cuts in the budget.

Okay, that's the most likely scenario. Now, tell me how you're gonna plan for the 4:00 meeting. I'm gonna go over the budget again. She's probably gonna tell me it should be slashed by 40%. I'm gonna show her the items that will keep it to 20%. So basically, by having people be in touch with catastrophizing, then countering it with the equally unrealistic what's the best case brings them to the average case. The voices that you hear, the catastrophization voices, are not voices of reality. They're voices that come from the Ice Ages, that are, uh, analogous to someone who's a rival for your boyfriend and wants to make your life miserable. So you can't treat your automatic thoughts as if they were true, and that's one of the basic discoveries of positive psychology and agency.

SV TAPE: I understand, Marty, that you've spent much of your own life as a pessimist. Um, have you managed to shift your own explanatory style?

Martin Seligman: Indeed I have, and I'm still learning these days, Shankar. So, indeed I'm very good at, uh, countering my 4:00 in the morning pessimistic thoughts. Indeed, I woke up at 4:00 in the morning last night.

“Oh my God, I've got this three-hour interview with Shankar. I'm almost 84 years old. he's up on the literature. I just remember the gist of the literature. I, I can't go through with this tomorrow.” So I heard that voice at 4:00 in the morning. Uh, the voice is never gonna go away, but I've gotten very good at arguing against it.

And so I said, "Hey, wait a minute. I just did a major interview last week. Uh, I was the same age. It went beautifully, and I knew the stuff at least as well as my interviewer." And then you may not have noticed today, we had technical trouble before. Uh, in the technical trouble, you and I warmed up together, and I saw how friendly, uh, you were and so I argued against it even as we started. Uh, but very importantly, even at this age, I, I keep learning about the importance of positivity.

SV TAPE: So the strategy you just told me about, which is contesting our catastrophic thoughts about what might happen in the future can help, of course, when we're thinking about things in the future. What do you advise we do when the, the catastrophic thing, so to speak, is behind us? We-- something has happened, and we feel like we have already failed.

Martin Seligman: The way we think about the present and the past has a lot to do about how active or passive we're gonna be in the future. And this is what explanatory style is about. So the pessimist believes when a bad event occurs in the present or in the past, it's permanent, it's gonna last forever, it's pervasive, it's gonna ruin my life in many areas, and it's personal that, uh, I made it happen.

So it's crucial to be on top of the way you explain bad events and your explanation about the future. So crucially, to the extent your reflexive beliefs are, "It's me, it's gonna last forever, it's gonna undermine everything I do," that produces learned helplessness.

SV TAPE: Hmm.

Martin Seligman: It produces passivity, and it produces passivity over a long period of time, and it produces depression because it becomes general. So it's very important to learn to argue against your most catastrophic interpretations of the past so that you can flourish in the future.

SV TAPE: Marty, you say that another way we can nurture our sense of agency is to design a series of increasingly difficult tasks so that as we go along, we develop a sense of progress and a sense of confidence?

Martin Seligman: You can increase your optimism, your, and your efficacy by starting absurdly small and letting, uh, events cascade. So, if you're depressed and you haven't done any housework lately, and you get out of bed and you look at your kitchen, it's filthy.

The sink is filled with dirty dishes. You go back to bed. Well, that's something you can really do something about. Take one small task, clean one cup, and put it in the cupboard. okay, you're able to do that. It turns out when you do one thing and you gradually make it more and more difficult, that there's a domino effect.

Uh, starting gradually is, i- important for efficacy. So agency has three components. The first component is optimism, and that's the belief that you can succeed in the future. The second component is efficacy, and that's the belief you can succeed right now in a, a specific task in the here and now. And the third component is innovation and imagination, and that's the range of scenarios that you can believe you achieve, in the future.

SV TAPE: I understand that you used this idea of getting small wins, uh, what you call a graded task treatment, on a group of patients hospitalized with depression?

Martin Seligman: Uh, yes, we found, in the very first study we ever did with depressed people, if we use graded task assignment, that we could lower the depression and increase what they did by graded task assignment. This came out of, uh, the breakthrough in phobias.

Uh, and basically the breakthrough in phobias was graded task assignment. And so, uh, it turned out, and this is what inspired us, if you're a cat-phobic, you're agoraphobic, you can't go out of the house because the grass has grown high and you're gonna be attacked by a cat, uh, what you do with great success is graded task assignment.

So you first teach people to bodily relax. Once they've learned relaxation, you start with the easy cat. Say, uh, "Imagine a person whose name is Ada Katz." K-A-T-Z. Uh, but relax. And it turns out people do this well. Okay, second task, uh, imagine the drawing of a cat and relax in its presence. And you build up all the way to, encountering a real cat, usually in between six and 10 graded things. And this is the, the best tool we have against, uh, specific phobias.

SV TAPE: Talk about the idea, Marty, that another way to develop our sense of agency is to adopt a growth mindset.

Martin Seligman: Yeah. I think Carol Dweck did the field a great service by capturing the notion of explanatory style with two words: growth and mindset. The mindset part is what we're talking about here, your reflexive way of thinking about the good and bad events that occur to you.

Growth means it's not permanent, it's not pervasive. And so what growth does, is tell you that any failure you have now is temporary and local, but as you grow and learn more, it migrates from permanent to temporary and pervasive to local. So growth mindset is a, a, a beautiful metaphor for what, explanatory style tells us about automatic thoughts.

Hmm.

SV TAPE: The stories we tell ourselves can quietly expand or shrink the range of possibilities we see before us. By learning to challenge certain stories and tell more of other kinds of stories, we can build our confidence and capacity to bring about change.

When we come back: how to use our imaginations to expand our sense of agency.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.



SV TAPE: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Has this conversation evoked your own experiences of feeling helpless? Has it reminded you of a time when you stepped up and took charge of your own destiny?

If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about the science of optimism and pessimism, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at [email protected].

Use the subject line: How to Make a Difference. Again, that's [email protected].

Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the author of many books, including Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.

Marty, in our conversation last week, you told me that one of the components of agency is imagination.

I want to talk about some of the ways we can expand our imaginations in the service of cultivating a sense of agency. You say that one strategy is to write about your best possible self?

Martin Seligman: One of the techniques that we use particularly to increase optimism and efficacy is to write about your best possible self, and what that can unleash is a set of scenarios about your future that have not occurred before.

Now, since agency has three components, uh, efficacy, optimism, and imagination, and we know a great deal about increasing optimism, we know a fair amount about increasing efficacy. I'm very interested in the question of increasing imagination.

My late colleague Danny Kahneman distinguishes between system one, which is intuition, and system two, which is deliberation. Uh, here's what I found just one story sums it up. A Nobelist from the University of Durham, , his field, what he was the genius of, is how do, uh, biological systems order random physical events?

So here's what he said. He had a vision at age 25 of a pudding, Jell-O, that's vibrating, and it recruits biscuits to stiffen it up. System one, intuition. He next spends the next 30 years in deliberation, that is mathematizing that vision. So for me, a lot of imagination and creativity has to do with something we don't know about, and that's how to make people's intuitions more creative.

Now, given that, uh, I think your listeners would wanna know what the usual techniques are. and let me just go through some of the techniques which improve creative performance at least a little bit. So, uh, if you're a writer, for example, one technique is to develop what-if scenarios in which there are multiple endings, and then choose among the endings. Mind wandering is probably pretty important for intuition. So daydreaming and dreaming, are related to creativity, and more than one of my turns in life had to do with dreaming and uh to find a situation that's most conducive.

Keep background noise low, keep lighting dim, and above all, move it physically. But if there's any disappointment I have in the entire agency literature is we don't have a killer app for imagination. And, uh, when someone tells you they've got one, hold on to your wallet.

SV TAPE: Talk a moment about this idea of writing about your best possible self. What does it involve? How would you do it, Marty?

Martin Seligman: There are lots of ways in. O-one thing I like to do, particularly with non-depressed people, is have a person write their own obituary for their grandchildren.

And what that particular technique-- By the way, we don't do this with depressed people since obituary sets off all s- all sorts of awful stuff. But imagining your most successful future and your route to how you got there, uh, is the basic structure of writing about the best possible self.

SV TAPE: You also talk about the idea that if we can't imagine, uh, ourselves having agency, one of the things that we can do is to expand our vision of what is possible by emulating others who have succeeded, especially others who are like us. Talk about this idea, Marty.

Martin Seligman: Yes. One of the techniques for imagination is, uh, to get to know people or to read about people who are like you, who have encountered a lot of obstacles, and see what they do. in my own life, reading Winston Churchill and reading Abraham Lincoln, all the biographies have been very instructive for me about how to make new departures under adversity.

SV TAPE: Marty, you tell a couple of stories about people you know who have found creative ways to expand their agency. The first was a young woman who was working her way through college as a waitress. What was the approach that she took?

Martin Seligman: I've been very interested in signature strengths, uh, and using signature strengths at work. there's a two-part exercise that really helps here, and I can illustrate it with a woman who was a student of mine and a waitress.

But the first part is you have to know what your s- highest strengths are, your signature strengths. And, uh, here's something I recommend for your listeners. I have a free website called Authentic Happiness, one word, dot-org. Uh, at least 10 million people, uh, have registered at the website, and one of the tests is the VIA Signature Strength Test.

Now, this is a test that, uh, at, at least five million people have taken now that tells you what your highest strengths are. So once you know what your highest strengths are, social intelligence, humor, uh, generosity, et cetera, the question is to use them more at work. Now, one of my students, one of my graduate students was a waitress.

She hated waitressing. Uh, heavy trays, being patronized by customers, ignored. so she took the Signature Strengths Test, and her highest strength was social intelligence. So her assignment was to use social intelligence more at work. So she resolved that she would make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's evening.

Uh, and indeed, that's what she put on display. Now, obviously, it didn't work all the time, but it worked enough so that tips were bigger, trays were lighter, and waitressing became fun. So the important thing about using your signature strengths is it not only produces more productivity at work, but a lot more positive emotion and less negative emotion. Find out what you're best at and use it, divert your work to use it more.

SV TAPE: And in some ways, it makes intuitive sense, Marty. If we're, if we're going to exercise agency, clearly it's going to be easier for us to exercise agency in the strengths and skills that come naturally to us.

Martin Seligman: Yes, I, I think, um, there really is something about being a natural. And, back in our first session, I talked about the advice I give to my students when they ask me about choosing a profession. And the advice I give is find the intersection of what you're naturally good at and what the world needs.

SV TAPE: Another of your students felt constrained by the fact that he had a long walk home through an unsafe neighborhood each night after he finished studying at the library.

He came up with an approach to give himself a feeling of agency that I thought was very imaginative. Tell me what he did, Marty

Martin Seligman: Well, again, he took the Signature Strength test, and for him, he was a hard worker. He studied in Van Pelt Library till midnight, and then had to walk through the most dangerous areas of Philadelphia for almost 40 minutes to get home again. It was the worst part of his day. He took the Signature Strength test, and his highest strength was humor and playfulness. So the assignment I gave him was to use humor and pla- playfulness to take the walk home at midnight. So he bought a pair of rollerblades and a stopwatch, and he declared it an Olympic event and timed himself every night, to get home. he loved doing that, and, then each night he was trying to break his own record to get home. It removed the fear from a, a dangerous walk, in his mind, and it became the highlight of his day.

SV TAPE: Can you talk for a moment about people who are, in fact, genuinely helpless? If, if struggle is, in fact, hopeless, if your life circumstances genuinely leave you in a bind, is it possible that agency can ever be a curse rather than a blessing, Marty?

Martin Seligman: Yeah, a- agency is, double-edged. So, for the last half hour with Shankar, I've been celebrating the virtues of agency. but there are downs-- there's a shadow side of agency. Uh, so one of the shadow sides is that there are people who are genuinely victims and oppressed and helpless. And, uh, an, overwrought sense of agency, uh, might get you to inappropriately blame them, blame the victim.

So oppression and helplessness are real, and I've spent half of my life working on it. So, that's an important shadow side of agency. Similarly, a shadow side of imagination, uh, is that, if we can do it and we imagine we can do it, uh, should it be done? And should we think about the consequences?

So when people think about atomic energy and about AI today, as I do a great deal of my time, we not only need to ask what can it do, what's the upside, but what are the downsides?

SV TAPE: One of the things that I want to talk about is the relationship between AI and agency. There are a great many people who feel like the, the rise of AI means that we are gonna be deprived of human agency, that it's gonna steal our ability to be autonomous, to make choices, to make decisions.

You have a much more optimistic view of the relationship between AI and agency. Tell me how you're thinking about it, Marty.

Martin Seligman: Okay. Well, first, the bottom line is, that the doomsayers have the press now, and you can hear all the hypothetical awful things that might happen. And I think that's part of responsible science, and we should worry about those things.

My task as a positive psychologist is to ask about the upside, not what's the most catastrophic thing that might occur, but what's, what are the best things? And I'm seeing some of those best things every day in my life. they've, convinced me that the upside of AI is enormous.

I'm finding that creativity is a function of two, the Wright brothers, McCartney and Lennon, that I've never had a more creative partner than Claude. I've been writing this book, Agency, for six years. Chapter eight of the book is about agency in ancient China, Confucius, in which, agency, uh, through the bind of, uh, Chinese, thinking is illustrated. Chapter Nine is about the Bible, uh, the difference between the Torah, which is non-agentic, and the rest of the Bible, which is agentic.

So I send it to my editor, and she sent it back to me and said, "You know, Marty, there's no transition between chapter eight and chapter nine." I've been staring at those two chapters, Shankar, for five years, and I couldn't see a transition. So I said to Claude, "Claude, read chapter eight and nine and write me a one paragraph transition."

Whoosh. Here's what Claude said. "At the same time and across the globe that the Chinese were wrestling with the tension between individual agency and the agency of the state, the Hebrews were wrestling with a more basic question, the relationship between individual agency and God's agency." Oh, that was exactly right.

It was just brilliant, and I couldn't see it.

Now, Marty didn’t end up using that bit of writing in his book. But it helped him to see a connection he couldn’t otherwise see. And that insight then allowed him to write his own segue between the two chapters.

So, for me, these machines are enormous aids to human creativity, uh, to my creativity. And I should say, Shankar, uh, I wake up in the morning now more excited than I've been in about 50 years to see what Claude and I can do together, uh, about hypotheses I've had about human psychology that could not have been tested without the massive computation of, uh, Claude and, uh, ChatGPT.

SV TAPE: Marty, you've been a professor for many decades, but you recently had a dream about being a student who had to deal with an algebra final exam. I'm pretty sure I've had the same dream as you did, but can you paint a picture for me of what happened in the dream?

Martin Seligman: Uh, I, these are called helplessness dreams.

We all have them. They're one of a Jungian archetype about what dreams are. I actually had a similar one just the other night, and it was about algebra, and that I've gone back to the Albany Academy. It's my senior year. I have to take the SATs. I can't remember anything except basic algebra. I don't know how to do quadratic equations.

I barely know what a quadratic equation is. A similar musical dream that I had recently, I love music. I find myself at Carnegie Hall. I'm about to give a concert. I look up and, I'm at the piano, and I realize, I don't know how to read music. I don't know how to play the piano, and I'm supposed to do the Hammerklavier.

That's Beethoven's most difficult, uh, pi- piano sonata. that's a dream we all have. It's built in importantly to us. we need to know what we're helpless about, but even more importantly, we need to know realistically what we can master.

SV TAPE: So when you wake up from these dreams, do you reflect on the fact that in the 80+ years that you have lived on earth, you in fact have demonstrated so much agency, you have made such a difference, Marty?

Martin Seligman: I do believe I made a difference. I went into psychology to relieve suffering. I think that was what I was after, but I think it was poorly articulated. What I really wanted to work on was not suffering, but wellbeing and happiness. But there was no psychology of wellbeing and happiness. It was a huge blind spot.

And so I think the difference I've made is to alert science and neuroscience to the possibility that human beings can have more agency, more mastery, and you can actually be happier tomorrow than you are today.

SV TAPE: Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the author of Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress.

Marty, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Martin Seligman: Oh, you're welcome, Shankar.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I’m Hidden Brain’s executive editor.

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