How to Change Your Mind

Honestly with Bari Weiss

The Free Press

News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 7.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a world where the personal has become political, and politics has swallowed everything, the stakes of changing your mind can feel really high. To change your mind is to risk betrayal – of your people, your culture, your tribe. But there may be nothing more important to a functioning democracy than to be able to influence each other, and be influenced ourselves, on the basis of conversation. So for today’s episode: the neuroscience of belief change. It’s an interview that aired last year on The Making Sense podcast, hosted by Sam Harris. Sam Harris is a lot of things: a best-selling author, a neuroscientist and a meditation teacher. In this conversation, Sam talks with cognitive neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan about how we can be more amenable to persuasion, why we mistake emotion as evidence, wishful thinking, and how we can become more critical of ourselves as we form new opinions. As Sam has said many times before, we only have two choices to resolve conflict as human beings: violence or conversation. To change your mind, or to be open to changing your mind, is to choose the latter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Barry Weiss and this is honestly. I've been thinking a lot these days about
0:06.1	change. In part that's because we Jews just celebrated the High Holy Days and
0:11.6	facing the new Jewish year ahead I'm thinking about
0:15.1	what I want to change how I want to be better but mostly it's because my wife
0:20.3	Nellie and I just welcomed a baby into the world.
0:23.6	One of the most intense revolutionary changes
0:27.0	a person can experience in this life.
0:30.7	Change is a lot of things. It's amazing. It's hard. It could be uncomfortable and in the case of becoming a parent, very, very tiring.
0:40.0	But maybe the hardest type of change of all of them is the change that we make
0:46.8	that's invisible. It's the change that we make for ourselves, by ourselves, inside ourselves. I'm talking about changing our
0:56.2	minds. The stakes of this type of change can feel very high, sometimes almost insurmountable.
1:05.0	And that's because in today's world, the personal has become political and politics
1:09.6	has swallowed everything.
1:11.5	So to change your mind, to change your politics, to change your view of an
1:15.6	issue is to risk betrayal of your people, your group, your tribe. It can feel safer to bury your head in the sand, to plug your ears to
1:26.4	new information. But as I've been reflecting on all of the changes in my own life over the
1:31.4	last few weeks, I'm ever more convinced that changing is a
1:36.8	hopeful act.
1:41.7	So for today's episode, The Science Behind Belief Change. It's an interview that
1:47.1	originally aired on my friend Sam Harris's podcast, Making Sense.
1:51.8	Sam Harris is a lot of things.
1:54.0	He's the best-selling author of The End of Faith
	...

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