Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

There are so many questions we never ask, so many assumptions we make every second of every day

because our minds and our lives are sealed off from one another, accessible only through time,

patience and the slow work of trust, all of which are often in short supply while we're running around trying to stick to

schedules. And there are some questions we don't ask for other reasons, because the answers

might tell us more than we want to know about ourselves. I'm so very happy to be here today for the second time on this

show with British, Turkish author, speaker, and educator Elif Shafak. In her latest novel, as in all

of her work, she asks some of these forgotten questions, and maybe more important, signposts

the infinity of doorways we walk past without noticing. The book, 10 minutes, 38 seconds in

this strange world, was one of six on the short list for this year's Booker Prize. Like any human

life, that of its heroine Leila is strange, beautiful, and important, and all too easily tossed

aside. Welcome to think again. Thank you. This book has a fairly clear structure. You know, you put, you set yourself a formal structure here.

You've got, you know, it's a, it's a number of minutes and a number of seconds.

Each chapter is beginning, or most of the chapters are beginning with a sense memory, which is taking us back into the past.

As a writer, how do you escape the trap that that can kind of set up?

I mean, once you create a formal structure like that for yourself, it feels to me like there might be a part of you as a creator that would rebel

against the structure or that would want, you know, want to find freedom within it or that

the structure might try to confine you at different times. How do you find freedom within that?

I think I need to go back a little bit and tell you how I became very interested in these

scientific and medical studies.

Okay.

That show after the moment of death, after the human heart has stopped beating, the mind can remain

...