Throwback Thursday: The Life-Changing Importance of Questions | Elizabeth Weingarten
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Welcome to Behavioral Grooves, the podcast that explores our human condition. I'm Kurt Nelson and I'm Tim Houlihan. We talk with researchers and other interesting people to understand how to find our groove in daily life. And today we are excited to share our conversation with Elizabeth Weingarten, author of How to Fall in Love with Questions. Yeah, Elizabeth's book is a fascinating blend of memoir.
Behavioral science and philosophy, drawing inspiration from the Austrian poet Reiner Marie Rilke, and his famous advice to love the questions themselves. Yeah, Tim, you love that part. I know that. And we talked about it before even going in. So what makes this book unique is that instead of offering a quick three-step process to deal with uncertainty,
Elizabeth invites us to develop a deeper relationship with the questions that shape our lives. Yeah, in our conversation we explore how our brains are wired to crave certainty and use as little energy as possible, making uncertainty feel profoundly uncomfortable for us. Yeah, and Elizabeth explains how this biological tendency makes us vulnerable to what she calls ultra-processed information, those quick, easy answers served up by social media influencers and I don't know today, Tim, you think AI might be serving up some of those ultra-processed question answers? Yeah, there you go.
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