Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan

As a 9-year-old, prodded by her mother, Maya Shankar walked into Juilliard unannounced and played her violin for whoever would listen, kicking off a period of study that included private lessons with one of the world's most esteemed musicians.

As a 26-year-old, her music career cut short by injury, Maya cold called the White House to offer her services as a cognitive scientist.

This is a conversation about hard endings, astonishing beginnings, and the chutzpah it often takes to transition from one moment in our lives to the next.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, this is "Tell Me More," and here's my conversation with podcaster, scientist, Rhodes Scholar, and every bit her mother's daughter Maya Shankar.

Hi.

Hi, Kelly.

Thank you so much for coming.

It's so wonderful to be with you.

Delighted to have you.

One of my favorite ideas from Daniel Kahneman... Yeah.

that I think he won the Nobel for it, which is that we're terrible cognitive forecasters.

We think that one thing is going to ruin our lives, but it's actually something much smaller.

Like, I think there was a comparison between having cancer or breaking a leg, and breaking a leg is actually much more trying for most people.

Yeah.

So can you talk about our ability to predict what will make us happy?

We're very bad at predicting the ways that big changes will change us.

In fact, in many ways, this observation was the inspiration for my podcast, "A Slight Change of Plans," which is all about marrying the science and storytelling to try to understand how it is that people respond to change, but one thing that I found is we tend to code changes at their outset as being good or bad.

It's just a cleaner narrative, and what we're forgetting when we do that is that we are really complex systems that are operating in even more complex ecosystems, which means that when you tweak one part of yourself, necessarily a bunch of other stuff is gonna get affected, right?

That one change is entangled with so many other parts of who we are.

That sort of reminds me of where we are politically, where people have foreclosed on an identity and that the idea of adjusting is super threatening.

Yeah.

I 100% experienced identity foreclosure as a kid.

I foreclosed on a bunch of other identities in favor of being a violinist.

So your mom came to this country, and in her belongings was her mother's violin.

Was it a totally off limits and sacred object, or was it like the best toy you ever had?

It was sitting in our attic, Kelly, for a very long time.

I don't even think I knew of its--of its existence, and then one day, my mom went up to the attic, and she brought it down with her and was eager to show it to me because I had had a very, very close relationship with my grandmother growing up.

When I would go to India over the summers, we were completely inseparable, and so when my mom brought the violin down and opened the case, I guess I was just really enamored with it.

And right away, love at first sight?

It was a right away thing.

I felt like with the violin you just get immediate feedback, and so you have a constant pulse on how you're doing and whether you're getting better... Uh-huh, uh-huh.

and there was something appealing to me about that even from the time I was a little kid.

And then you were 9 or something, and your mom walked you into Juilliard?

Yes.

I will never forget this day.

She knew that my big dream was to audition and hopefully get accepted to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, but she had no idea how to make that happen, and so one day, we were in the city.

I had my violin with me.

I was there for another audition, and we walked by the Juilliard School in Lincoln Center, and it's this gorgeous complex, and my mom just says to me, "Maya, why don't we just walk in?"

She basically just tells the security guards, like, "My daughter's dream is to one day study here.

Do you mind if you let us in?"

And she then strikes up a conversation with a young girl and her mom in the elevator and says, you know, "Who do you study with?"

You know, by the end of the elevator ride, my mom had basically scored me a meeting with this teacher, and I auditioned for him on the spot.

He basically signals to me, like, "You're totally not ready for Juilliard yet, "but I have a summer camp that I lead, "where I will invite you to be one of my students, and it's essentially going to be a boot camp," and so that summer I went and studied under this teacher.

I mean, it was the most intense and immersive violin experience I'd ever had in my life.

I went back home to Connecticut after this big summer camp, and I prepped, and I remember the morning of my audition the thing that was keeping me afloat was my dad had told me "No matter how your audition goes, "we're gonna watch 'Ace Ventura' as a family when you come home tonight," and so I got all dressed up, and we go to Juilliard.

I go in, and I have the best audition of my life, which is something you can't take for granted, right?

Right.

I got word that I had been accepted, and it just changed my life.

I was 9 years old, and from that point on, we were traveling to New York City every Saturday.

I was waking up at 4: 30 in the morning, 10 hours of classes, then would take the train home.

And you studied with Itzhak Perlman.

I did, yeah.

When I was in high school, and so I played for him, and it was actually just meant to be a one-off experience, and then he told my teacher "I would really like to take her on as a private violin student."

And he only had a handful of students.

How attached were you to that identity?

Incredibly attached.

If I was in an airport and I didn't have a strap around my shoulder and a violin there, I felt like I was missing a part of my body.

Everything in my life centered around the violin.

My schedule at school was based on my violin.

My spine to this day is curved because of all the hours I spent doing this... Uh-huh.

Yeah.

and my shoulders are, like, a little bit uneven because I spent, again, so many hours, just hours and hours and hours doing this.

I knew the violin was such a foundational part of who I was, but you don't really internalize that until what happened later in my story, which was I lost the ability to play, and that's actually when I realized how tethered my identity was to the violin.

Before then, I was a kid having the time of her life.

I don't think I understood the significance of that relationship until I couldn't play anymore.

What happened?

So I was at Perlman's camp over the summer, and, you know, my career was going like this, and I overstretched my finger on a single note, just one note.

I heard a popping sound, and I knew something was wrong, but I was also a teenager, and I was in denial, and so I kept playing through pain for weeks and weeks and just denying reality basically because the idea of not being a violinist truly did not feel like an option.

Finally, doctors told me that I could not play the violin anymore, and I had torn tendons in my hand, and a series of medical complications happened, surgeries and whatnot, and I just was never able to play again.

[Playing classical music] And you must have felt so terribly lost.

Like, "It's all for nothing.

I have not--I don't even know who I am anymore."

Yeah, I felt incredibly lost.

I felt, um-- I felt my sense of control vanish.

You know, we have this lovely illusion of control as we live our lives, and this entire future that I'd mapped out for myself just no longer existed.

I guess I just felt like "Am I gonna get lucky enough to find something again that I love as much as I love this thing?"

What happened is the summer before college, I was in my parents' basement.

I was supposed to be in China touring with my musical classmates, so I was basically having--I mean, I had FOMO before the word-- the term FOMO existed for all of high school there-- for the second half of high school because my musical classmates were going on to do these amazing things, and I couldn't join them, and I was just perusing the bookshelf, and I came across a course book of my sister's, and it was called "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.

The book detailed this marvelous capacity we have as humans to understand and produce language, and before I read this book, Kelly, I'd completely taken my language abilities for granted.

It was just something that was just there, you know?

And then when I read in Pinker's book about the incredibly complex machinery that's operating behind the scenes that gives rise to these abilities, I felt completely in awe of this organ--ha ha-- of our minds, of our brains, and I just felt curiosity, and that was so exciting for me to be curious about something, to want to study something more, to want to learn more about something.

Yeah.

Fast forward about 10 years.

So I did my undergrad in cognitive science, I did a Ph.D. in cognitive science, and I did a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience.

I finally had this, again, false feeling that everything was finally falling into place, which is a feeling we all love.

It's irresistible to be like, "Ah!

now it's settled.

"This time."

"This time."

Then I was in this dark basement laboratory of Stanford's Neuroscience Lab for several hours at this point, and I just had an "Oh, crap" moment.

Like, this thing that I've been doing for 10 years is not a good fit for my personality.

Like, I'm in this windowless basement, I'm looking at this dude's amygdala.

I don't know anything about him.

I haven't fed my own curiosity about him.

Does he have a family?

What's his favorite book?

What's his favorite ice cream flavor?

Like, things that I would just want to know about a person, but yet I'm peering into his brain, and I just felt like the order of operations is wrong here.

I need a more social job.

I need to feel like I'm part of a team.

I want to see the impact of my work, and so I ended up calling my undergrad advisor and saying, "Hey.

So I know you've "really invested in me for a long, long time, "like, since the time I was 17 "and you took me on as your mentee, "but I don't actually want to do the thing anymore "that you put all this effort into, "so I'm really sorry, but I will be doing "general management consulting interviews starting, like, next week."

Oh, my God.

And my advisor was basically like, "Maya, take a moment.

Breathe.

There are other options," and it was so fortuitous.

She had just been to a conference where she heard the professor Cass Sunstein give a talk.

Mm-hmm.

He's the coauthor of the book "Nudge."

Mm-hmm.

It's all about how these subtle changes in the way that we design programs and policies can have an outsized influence on our behavior.

And he had given a talk in which he talked about how the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Obama administration had used behavioral principles to help solve a really thorny problem that existed within government.

This program, the National School Lunch Program, offers low-income kids access to free or reduced-price lunches at school.

It's offered to millions of kids, but millions of kids were still going hungry every single day at school because the parents had not signed up their kids for the program.

And when they did a behavioral audit of why that was, they discovered some really interesting features.

One, when there was a huge stigma associated with signing up your kids for a public benefits program.

Secondly, the form was extremely burdensome to fill out, and we might think of that as being not a huge barrier because we have the luxury of resources and time, but imagine a single mom who's working 3 shifts to make ends meet and now has to take an hour of her workday to go to the post office on a very specific day in order to mail the application in, and if you make a mistake, you might get a financial penalty, which could ruin her financial state.

And so what the government did is it changed the program from an opt-in program to an opt-out program.

So now all eligible kids were automatically enrolled in the school lunch program, and as a result of this policy change, a change in the default setting of the program, 12.5 million more kids were now eating lunch at school every day.

Right.

And I was just blown away.

I heard about this one case study of taking one elegant insight from behavioral economics and applying it to a social problem, and I told my advisor on the phone "I want to do that thing."

And so I ended up sending a cold e-mail to Cass Sunstein and I said, you know, "I'm a huge admirer of your work, "and I'm a postdoc who has no public policy experience, and I've published nothing of significance."

Again, kindness of strangers.

Cass, who does not know me, responds within a few minutes and says, "Here's contact information "for Obama's science advisor.

Please let him know I sent you along."

Wow.

And I interviewed with an Obama adviser two days later.

He basically said to me, "Pitch me on this position that you're proposing.

"Tell me why we should create a role for a dedicated behavioral scientist."

Had it never occurred to any administration before to sort of leverage everything we were learning in psychology against the problems of a nation?

There were definitely luminaries who were working in this space like Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler was advising the government, but there had not been a dedicated role, and that's the important thing in government is there are so many competing priorities that unless you bring something to the forefront, unless it's their exclusive job to be translating insights from a scientific field into improvements in policy, it's just unlikely to happen.

And it was kind of like a startup, right?

Like, you were in the basement, you had no people, there was no mandate.

I had no budget.

You weren't getting invited to meetings.

Like, it was-- Oh, my gosh.

I learned--I learned resilience.

I learned how to be told no.

I came in, and I had this audacious vision of building a team of dedicated behavioral scientists because I wanted to have a multiplying impact and wanted to see whether we could really make this vision that I had in my head into a formalized part of government.

At the time, the president had no idea who I was or that I'd been hired, and I just slowly built support door by door, knocking on every door.

"Hi, I'm Maya.

Um, you don't know me.

"I think you should work with me on this really important behavioral science pilot."

An example of an early pilot was in collaboration with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and they offer a employment and educational counseling program for people who have recently returned from military service.

Similar to the school lunch program, not enough vets were taking advantage of this program, and it's such a challenging transition from military to civilian life, right?

It's fraught with all sorts of challenges, and so the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, you know, they were financially strapped, and their resources were limited, and they said, "Maya, we have just one e-mail "that we're sending out to vets "informing them of this benefit.

Can you and your little team help?"

And we ended up changing just one word in the e-mail message about the program.

Instead of telling vets that they were eligible for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service, and that one-word change led to a 9% increase in access to the veterans benefit, which is extraordinary because it was a costless change.

That's the thing about "Nudge" is that it's not using economic benefits to change behavior.

It's using us.

Well said.

That's exactly right.

It is using our best understanding of human nature, of human behavior, of all the biases that constitute our mental lives, and making sure that policies and programs reflect that understanding.

You did have so much success at the White House.

You changed the way things happen at the VA on a few forms, you changed some things that happen in the Department of Agriculture for farmer loans.

Is that office still up and running?

Yeah, I'm happy to say that the team is still up and running, and it's doing a lot of really good work in government to help people who are in the throes of the opioid crisis, to helping people in the face of natural disaster.

I'm incredibly proud of what the team has continued to do.

Maya, are you ready for the "Tell Me More" speed round?

I am ready.

Best live performance you've ever seen.

Right before COVID hit, I was able to see my favorite violinist Stefan Jackiw play the Beethoven violin concerto.

What was your first job?

I worked at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and I had to time how long every person spent at each exhibit.

What do you wish you had more time to do?

So my husband is Chinese, and all of his relatives in China don't speak English.

So I started to learn Mandarin over the last couple of years.

It's an incredibly hard language.

It's very musical, though, because of the tones, so it does connect a bit with my musical background.

So I would like to be able to commit a bit more.

What's your go to mantra for hard times?

Sleep as much as you can.

Everything will feel more manageable even after a nap.

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address and what would you say?

Hmm.

Martin Luther King Jr., and I would say... "Black president in 2009."

Oh!

That's great.

I'm thinking about narrative through lines.. Yeah.

and how desperate we are to have them.

Like, I feel like it's almost like the resume effect where you can say, "Well, my job here led to my job there led to my job there," because no one wants to say, "I was kind of lost."

We are irresistible storytellers.

What I find so interesting is not just that we irresistibly tell stories.

It's how much we can learn from the kinds of stories we choose to tell ourselves.

Mm-hmm.

Actually, in many ways, a lot of the interviews that I have on "A Slight Change of Plans" are figuring out, "OK.

So you went through this stuff, "and then--and then here's the story you told about it, and what does that tell you about you?"

Well, the interesting thing is that that requires that you recognize that you're telling yourself a story.. Yeah.

and that you could tell it slightly differently should you choose to.

The one big lesson that I learned from losing the violin was that I needed to see my identity as more malleable, almost as a survival strategy.

You strip away the superficial features of the instrument itself, and you figure out what still remains.

Yeah.

What is there that ignites me?

And ultimately, I realized it was human connection.

I realized that as a kid I loved the idea of being able to go on a stage and have this intimate emotional experience with people in the audience that I'd never met before through my music, and those people in turn can move you based on their response, right?

It's a conversation, and that's why I became a cognitive scientist because I actually study the human mind and how it is that we form connections with one another and how we make decisions.

So I think that desire for human connection is what brought me into the public policy space and my work at the United Nations.

"A Slight Change of Plans" is the love of my life.

I have absolutely fallen in love with the process of getting to cut through all the pleasantries and getting to know someone and just trying to, like, really understand their heart and understand why it is they are the way they are today and how the big changes in their lives have changed them.

When I was recording the second season of "A Slight Change of Plans," I had my own slight change of plans where my husband and I lost identical twin girls to a miscarriage with our beloved surrogate, and it was our second pregnancy loss with our surrogate Hayley, and even though I felt like--you know, I study change, you know, for a living and I've had a lot of personal experiences with change, I felt so unprepared for this change, and it felt so unprecedented that it kind of knocked my socks off a bit.

Mm-hmm.

And... what I found in that moment is I just started irresistibly telling myself stories about why this was and why this-- why this came to be and what the silver linings were going to be, and "Oh, OK. "I'm going to share my story with the world as a way to turn something horrible into something good."

And so I recorded an episode about it, and then there were moments where I was, like, "You know what?

This actually also just sucks."

Mm-hmm.

That's also an honest story to tell yourself.

Yes, you can find silver linings... Mm-hmm.

you can write that narrative, and it's also OK if you interject the story at times and just say that it really sucks and you're really heartbroken.

Yeah.

So you must have all kinds of tricks of the trade of how to change a person's mind, and I know that you worked with Buttigieg, Pete Buttigieg before he started doing his debates.

Yes.

Debate prep.

What do you have?

What do you have for us, for us lay people who are trying to change each other's minds?

Well, first of all, studying cognitive science has been the greatest empathy builder when it comes to understanding why it is that people arrive at their views.

Even if you don't agree with what they've arrived at, you at least understand the why, and I think realizing that our beliefs about the world certainly can be informed by evidence, but in large part, it's informed by our group membership, our tribal membership, the people that we associate with.

Identity.

Identity.

Exactly.

So one of the guests that I interviewed on "A Slight Change of Plans," his name is Daryl Davis, and he is a Black jazz musician who convinced dozens of people to leave the Ku Klux Klan, and he put all of these evidence-based strategies into action.

So he showed genuine curiosity for why it is that they arrived at their views.

He increased his question-to-statement ratio.

Uh-huh.

He didn't talk at them.

He talked with them.

Yeah.

He made sure to recruit their sense of agency.

So making sure that they felt empowered to change rather than him imposing his belief system on them.

These small tweaks in framing the small changes in the ways that we approach conversations with one another can have such a big impact on how-- On the outcomes.

On the outcomes.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So one of our favorite guests from a previous season is Samantha Power, who is married to Cass Sunstein, and when we asked her for her Plus One, she picked him.

So speaking of Plus Ones...

Yes.

Who is yours?

I'm choosing Christy Warren.

Christy Warren was a first responder for 25 years, first as a paramedic in Vallejo, California, and then in Berkeley, California, as a firefighter.

Mmm.

And Christy was told fairly early in her career that most women in the fire service don't make it to full retirement, and when she heard that, she developed this incredible resolve that "I am going to make it.

Nothing is gonna stop me from reaching full retirement."

She talks about how there was this videotape playing in her mind that she could not terminate of all of these gruesome, tragic, heart-wrenching scenes that she had seen over the course of her career, and then one day the box got so full that it just exploded, and she had severe PTSD, and then at night, she would have nightmares in which she wasn't able to save people.

And so her life turned into a nightmare, and I was able to actually interview her for "A Slight Change of Plans."

It's one of my favorite episodes.

It's her self-discovery that she was enough without being a hero.

It's also her journey of taking extremely brave steps to care for her mental health, to actively step down as a firefighter, and to set a model for all those first responders who need that kind of courage, and I am so inspired by her.

And that's an example of this identity thing, which takes us all the way back to the beginning, which is if you're attaching so tightly to this identity of, like, "I'm a hero, and this is what a hero is," then when life deals you a new card, the work is trying to discover what about that identity was so powerful for you and if you can activate that same set of moves and feelings and behaviors on behalf of some other group of people.

Yeah, and I think, you know, some of this came from her childhood.

She had a really rough childhood where she felt very overlooked and ignored, and she says, you know, "When you're a firefighter, "everyone's looking at you.

"You are valued, you are recognized, you matter."

Mm-hmm.

And it took her a very long time to realize that she mattered without any of that.

It kind of makes me think of all the people watching you play violin as a kid and how special that must have made you feel and then having to find a new way to feel special.

Well, you're doing so much with all your talents and gifts.

Thanks a lot for saying yes.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, Kelly.

Yeah, it's great.

If you enjoyed today's conversation, you'll love my sit-downs with neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett and grit researcher Angela Duckworth.

If you prefer to listen, you can hear the audio of every episode on my podcast "Kelly Corrigan Wonders."

Everything we've ever made for you is available 24/7 at pbs.org/kelly.