When an injury at the age of 15 put an end to her career as a violin prodigy, Maya Shankar learnt an early brutal lesson in how life can change in an instant.
Since then she has studied how humans react to change in her work as a cognitive scientist.
Dr Shankar also has a podcast A Slight Change of Plans where she talks to guests who have also been forced to pivot and discover what they're truly made of.
Photo: mayashankar.com
When her violin career ended she grieved much more than she expected, she told Jesse Mulligan.
“When we lose something, certainly when I lost the violin, I didn't expect to grieve the loss of myself, I don't think I realised how tethered my self-identity was to the violin.”
Change fills us with a complex range of emotions, she says.
“We can feel anticipation and excitement and we can also feel trepidation and fear and anxiety. And so it really is an multifaceted experience.
“I think one reason that we can fear change is that we tend to code change as either exclusively bad or exclusively good at the outset. I certainly used to code the world in this way before starting A Slight Change of Plans.
“And what I learned from the guests on my show is that really we're just engaging in bad, what I call, cognitive forecasting, where we fail to appreciate that when one part of our life changes, the other parts of our lives don't remain unchanged, we're living in these complex ecosystems and change in one area of our lives can have all of these unexpected, hard to predict, spill-over effects into other areas of our lives.”
In her, she realised much of what she loved about the violin was connection.
“I loved the fact that I could emotionally connect with total strangers that, as a young kid, I could go out on a stage and play in front of thousands of strangers, people I have never met before and potentially have the ability to make them feel something they've never felt before.
“And that was so intoxicating, and so special. And it's really a gift that you're given as a human. And I think in that moment, I realised, OK human connection, that's the thing that's lighting me up.”
Studying cognitive science filled that void, she says, it’s a career that has taken her all the way to the White House.
She worked on programmes where cognitive science and public policy were brought together, she says.
“A really concrete example of this is the US offers what's called the National School Lunch Program to low income kids.
“They get free or reduced price lunches at school, but despite the fact that programme was offered, millions of kids were still going hungry every single day.
“And the reason for that is there were some behavioural barriers in the way of getting access to the program.”
One barrier was that the programme had a complex form to fill out, she says.
“What the government did is it leveraged a really powerful insight from behavioural science called the power of the default option.
“And it basically changed the programme from an opt-in programme to an opt out programme. So now parents only had to take an affirmative step if they actively wanted to unenroll their kids, because their kids would be automatically enrolled in the programme without any action.”
That change means 12.5 million more children are now eating school at lunch every day, she says.
