This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Human beings are always trying to make sense of the world.

When things happen to us, or to our communities, or in our nations,

we understand those events through the lens of culture,

through ideology, or through the prism of our own perspectives.

You see a homeless man on the street, or a tycoon getting on a yacht.

Why is one so poor and the other so rich?

Many of us have already answers to these questions,

because we've spent years or decades perfecting our preferred stories.

But what would happen if we just...

stopped?

If we told ourselves, you know, I might not actually have a very good handle on the world.

My theories are just that.

The theories.

This week on Hidden Brain, the story of a kid from Calcutta,

who became a Nobel Prize winner by asking a deceptively simple question.

How do you know that's true?

In 1937, Abhijit Bananjee's grandfather,

struck a real estate deal in Calcutta.

It turned out to be a very bad deal.

Oh, my grandfather thought he was willing very clever when he built his house.

He thought, well, I'm getting this plot cheap, not quite getting the idea that there might be reason why he was getting cheap.

...