Hidden Brain visited 16 cities with our perceptions tour in 2025,

and we're excited to visit even more communities across the U.S. this year.

We'll have more announcements about tour stops in the months to come.

For now, I want to make sure you know about two live shows that are coming up soon.

I'll be in Philadelphia at the Miller Theater on March 21st and at the town hall in New York City on March 25th.

For tickets to either show, go to hiddenbrain.org slash tour.

That's hiddenbrain.org slash tour. I hope to see you there. Okay, here's today's show.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In a famous Chinese parable, a man frustrated with all of his

failures, exiles himself to the woods.

There, he meets a hermit with whom he shares his frustrations.

Give me one good reason not to quit, the man tells the hermit.

The hermit points to a tall patch of foliage.

You see this bamboo? He asks.

I nurtured it for a year, and it did not grow as much as an inch.

But the hermit did not give up.

The second year, he waters and nurtures the plot again.

Nothing. A third year goes by.

Again nothing.

Year four, the same.

By the fifth year, the hermit says,

a tiny sprout emerged from the earth,

and within six months, the tree grew a hundred feet tall.

...