This is an ABC podcast.

Hey, Sana Khadar here from All In The Mind, letting you know that this week's episode is one from our archives because I lost my voice this week.

And it's slowly coming back, but it hasn't come back in time for me to lay the voice over for what was meant

to be today's episode, which we did tease in last week's episode. So it's really bad timing

for me to lose my voice. But we will get to Harry Harlow's very unethical experiments,

but very important experiments that taught us a lot about the importance of love and touch

and affection in childhood.

We'll play that next week. My voice will be back by then.

In the meantime, here is our episode on why being a beginner is good for you.

Tom Vanderbilt didn't know how to play chess. That fact never bothered him until one day at the library with his four-year-old daughter. We were playing a game of Checkers, which is something I know how to play. And right next to the Checkers board, there was a chess board, and she asked this kind of simple question, can we play that game? It looks really interesting. I said, you know, I would love to, but I actually don't really know how to play. I don't think I ever fully learned. So, you know, this was sort of kind of a shameful thing to have to admit to his then four-year-old daughter that I didn't know how to do something. But I wanted to encourage her, and I sort of had the sense of chess as a very sort of dignified game that was somehow

sort of good for you mentally. So I did what a lot of modern parents do and I hired a coach.

Tom decided he wanted to learn as well. He'd been trying to teach himself online, but wasn't really

getting anywhere. So this coach came by and I said, is it okay if I sort of jump in on these lessons as well?

And I thought it would be a funny, non-scientific experiment with a sample size of two,

in which you had these two different beginners at the same task, separated by all of these years of age.

I was approaching 50 at the time.

And it also raised the idea that I myself

had not really learned that many new skills like the game of chess in quite some time.

It just struck a chord that I thought, here I am telling my daughter how important it is

to learn new things. Why aren't I doing the same thing?

You're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

Lifelong learning can have a multitude of benefits,

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