Well, happy Friday and happy day 2 of LOVING YOU FEELS..!
The first time the idea of this series came to me was last year, when I was listening to my favorite podcast called On Being, and the guest was Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, psychologist and Harvard professor of Social Ethics.
Towards the end of the episode, Krista Tippett asks Dr. Banaji, “how do you construct your life, your environment? How do you move through the world differently having taken [the Implicit Association] test yourself, also having also not liked the results? Because of this science that you do, what actions do you take that turns that understanding into change?”
Dr. Banaji’s response is something I’ve thought of almost every day for a year…
“…the other thing that I do is to actually create inputs into my mind of my own making. I do think that in some ways our brains are simple and that they will believe that things are real even if they’re not. So, that’s what movies do. That’s what novels do for us. They — and so what if I have a series of 1,000 pictures that rotate through on my screen saver of people who come from many parts of the world that I will never, ever see or even think about. Look, just take an example close by. I have no idea what life for a farmer in Iowa is. I bet it’s hard. I bet I have no idea what they have to deal with. I don’t think I will ever truly understand.
But, right now, they’re a distant group in my mind. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I don’t think about farming and farmers. If my screen saver literally just points out the existence of such people and what their issues might be, I believe that my brain is going to begin to care at some level. And, if I show myself possibilities that don’t exist easily, that’s even better.
These are hopes, but I also — I don’t just say it’s a hope because I do know enough as a psychologist about learning and memory. And I know that we learn. How much of this I need to do in order to change, I cannot say. But I can say that there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold.”
And so, this series was born. May ‘our brains begin to care’… xo
Loving you feels … like Ryan + Orie.
Ryan [AKA Waking Up With Ryan] has become a dear friend over the past 2.5 years, and getting to know Orie more recently has been a delight and joy. These two went to the same high school, and Ryan was dance friends with Orie’s sister back in the day, but love is often on its very own timeline, don’t you know.
We adore these gents past words, respect what they create in the world, and are incredibly inspired by the love that they share.
R+O, I love you. Thank you for letting me spend a bit of Orie’s birthday morning with you two in Malibu. xo
(don’t forget to listen to their audio clip from our time together!)
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