Behavioral Scientist Reads
The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture, and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become.
Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.
behavioralscientist.org
Behavioral Scientist Reads
Episode 1: Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going?
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Why did we choose this strange, fragmented novel for the summer book club? What do we know about its author, Olga Tokarczuk? And what are some “reading maps” we can use to start finding our way in this very different kind of story?
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Episode 1 was produced and edited by Stephanie Tam, and mixed by Phil Bodger. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphreys.
Thank you to the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make the podcast possible.
Find out more at bookclub.behavioralscientist.org and behavioralscientist.org.
Published by Behavioral Scientist magazine.
Hello everyone, Evan Nestrak here.
SPEAKER_02And I'm Stephanie Tam. Welcome to Behavioral Scientist Reads. The podcast that explores what it means to be human through conversations at the intersection of science and culture and books that illuminate who we are and who we can become.
SPEAKER_04In a world that's getting increasingly noisy and distracting, this is a chance to hit pause, read great literature, and draw out insights about our humanity. This summer, we'll be reading Olga Tokarchuk's Flights, a novel that defies categorization. Part memoir, part short story collection, part ethnography of travel.
SPEAKER_02We'll be speaking with leading experts across the sciences and arts, geography, medicine, and translation.
SPEAKER_04Together, we'll dive deeper and ask big questions, like, what's behind the human impulse towards movement? What do our movements and memories amount to? Do they form a meaningful whole, or are they simply fragments? The fruits of entropy and fate rather than free will.
SPEAKER_02Who gets to move and who gets to stay put? Where do we really come from as a species? And where are we headed as a world?
SPEAKER_04Join us on our journey as we probe literary themes and map out questions with our guest experts.
SPEAKER_02We won't always end up with answers, but we can promise you a fascinating adventure as we travel towards the very heart of human nature. Hey Evan. So before we dive into the book, let's just take a moment to orient ourselves where we're coming from and where we're going. So we met about nine years ago when you were first starting Behavioral Scientist.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that was uh year one when we had just launched, and I was trying to get the word out. We had a booth at the Behavioral Science and Policy Association conference in New York City.
SPEAKER_02Right. This was back when I was working for Freakonomics at New York Public Radio. And as radio journalists, we had fun press passes to all kinds of science conferences. I mean, fun if you're a nerd. And you had this table in front of the main conference room and gave me this elevator pitch about this cool new magazine.
SPEAKER_04Yes. And I probably said something like, Behavioral Scientist is a magazine dedicated to exploring and understanding the world through the social and behavioral sciences. And then, too often what we know and what we're learning about ourselves and others remains hidden, locked away in the ivory tower, so to speak, or it remains siloed within each discipline. And then I probably asked if you had any article ideas. And you did. You ended up writing a terrific long-form piece for us about the economics of immigration and innovation, which I still think about any time a debate about the economics of immigration pops up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was fun to work together on that. And over the years, it's been really cool to see behavioral scientists evolve from a science magazine into one that's increasingly in conversation with different disciplines, from literature to philosophy.
SPEAKER_04Yes. And actually the thing that attracts me to both science and literature is the same. What great art and science do is they help reveal who we are and who we can become for better and for worse. And I think of novelists and writers and artists and social scientists kind of trying to get at those questions of who we are and who we can become, but with different methods. And the worlds for literature and behavioral science have always intersected for me, but I haven't been always able to explore that. So I remember as a sophomore, I took a Shakespeare class in college, and we had to analyze Twelfth Night, and we had to analyze Isabella's character in Twelfth Night, and particularly, you know, the portrayal of women in the play. And I remember thinking to myself, well, the natural way to answer this question is how were women perceived at the time William Shakespeare was writing? Why did he have the views that he had? What were the sort of social and political things going on that could influence women's standing and women's rights and all of these things? And so I think I managed to get that into an essay somehow. And my professor was not impressed and basically told me you have to stick with the text. What is the text telling you? Which I totally understand is now is a valid way, but it totally made no sense to me that the worlds of psychology and sociology were kept separate from what I felt was a very psychological and sociological question, even though the origins were in literature. And so anyway, that ended my dreams of being an English major. But I did become a psychology major. And 20 years later, here we are combining the two worlds.
SPEAKER_02That's actually that's actually really funny because one of the reasons that I decided to become an English major was because it was so interdisciplinary. So like I I think you know, I did my dissertation on um Lord of the Rings and Kazu Ishiguro. And part of what I was looking at was post-traumatic stress. You know, Tolkien was this war veteran and navigating a lot of war experiences through the lens of fantasy, and um actually started writing Lord of the Rings while he was on the front lines of the Great War. And of course, the epic babble of Middle-earth is also called the Great War. Um, so there's like tons of psychology and stuff in that. But um, anyway.
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm glad you you were able to do it. And now I think we make the perfect team. How about that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there we go. But yeah, I do really resonate with the disciplinary silo frustration. I mean, as someone who studied literature and psychology and social policy, I often get asked about what the connecting thread between all those different subjects is. And on one level, the straightforward response is that I'm just an omnivorous nerd. And my favorite thing about my work is actually getting to learn constantly about all different kinds of stuff from underground tree networks to the economics of altruism. But on a deeper level, I actually think that everything, science, art, philosophy, is interconnected. And that's what really excites me about this book club. That we get to explore what it means to be human at the intersections of science and literature. Okay, so that brings us to our summer book club.
SPEAKER_04Yes, this summer we are reading Flights by Polish author Olga Tokarczyk.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of flights. How would you describe this book, Evan?
SPEAKER_04Well, it's actually pretty hard to describe. So when I first started reading this book, for the first several pages, I was like, what am I reading? Actually make that the first several chapters. Or not chapters, because they aren't really chapters. They are sections, segments.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sections, fragments. There's a first-person narrator, this nameless female traveler who may or may not be Tokarchuk herself. And then there are these essayistic reflections, short story type segments, travel anecdotes, uh, fictionalized histories. It's not always clear what is actually fiction versus fact. Uh, and some of those sections actually run on for up to like 30 pages, while others are just a few paragraphs. I think there might be one that is even just a sentence. And I believe there are 116 sections in total.
SPEAKER_04Yes, and unlike most novels, there isn't an obvious plot.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and we just lost half our book club members with that statement. Um it's true, this is not a plot-driven novel. But wait, before you hurl your book out into the sea, there is mystery and maybe even intrigue. Because part of what drove me on when I too was asking, what am I reading? was the puzzle of what exactly connects all of these different stories and subjects and threads. So I was thinking it's a little bit like a scavenger hunt, except you don't always know what you're looking for. And sometimes you see this shiny thing in the distance, and you think, could that be what I'm looking for? Is that treasure or is it trash? And sometimes the brilliant thing about Tokarczyk is she's really good at showing us that the thing that looks like trash is in fact treasure. So I think that's also what makes this a great book club book. You know, you don't want to do a scavenger hunt on your own. It's way more fun when you get to work together as a team to draw out new insights and discoveries.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I really like that metaphor of a scavenger hunt. I was also thinking a little bit about travel itself. So, you know, when you're traveling, there are times when you're traveling where time feels like it goes on forever. The 15 minutes while you're boarding feels like it could be an hour. And then there are moments when you're traveling where an entire day goes by and it's already the sun setting, and you're like, you've been all over a city or you've been all over a place, and it feels like things went by really quickly. You also meet people and characters when you travel that you wouldn't meet in your normal routine, and that's part of the brilliance of travel. And I feel like you can't choose your seat mate on the plane, typically. And so sometimes you have these weird encounters or these weird conversations that you can't predict, but it's part of that uncertainty and part of that unpredictability that makes travel both challenging and remarkable, and why we do it again and again. There are also moments of limbo, you know, if your flight gets delayed or um, you know, you're stuck at the train station for a while for whatever reason. And I feel like sometimes in the book you can feel like you're in this limbo. I remember some of the longer passages early on. I was like, how much of this do I need to remember? And will this come back? But I feel like, well, now that I'm on the other side of it, I feel like it's worth it. So I'm this like a encouragement to people who are just picking up the book. But I also want to save some of what I've learned for later conversation so people can kind of experience some of that uncertainty and unpredictability on their own. I feel like that's a that's a key part of the experience of reading flights.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I think there is that discovery aspect that you kind of discover it for yourself. Yeah, I think in a way it is also a little bit like life itself. Um, you know, travel and mobility as this metaphor for life. There's one section in the book that's called returning to one's roots. And the narrator refers to these three travel questions that all travelers ask each other. The questions are, where are you from? Where are you coming in from, and where are you going? And it's not hard to read that question into larger questions that the novel asks about where we come from as humans and what makes us human in relation to other animals, in relation to the environment, also where we're all headed as a world. So I think there's a lot in the novel, and also in the form of the novel, that actually really invites metaphor. Flights is also interesting. It's, as we've said, it's a novel that defies categorization. And part of what I actually loved about the first Olga Tukarczyk book that I read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, was just how weird it was. Um it was like hanging out with this eccentric, unpredictable, and rambly old woman. And I mean that in the best way possible. Also, to be clear, I'm talking about Yanina, the main character and narrator of the novel. She's philosophical, curious, she's observant, and also weirdly obsessed with William Blake. And the rabbit trails of her mind are all really funny and fascinating. And Flights has a similarly unique way of looking at the world. I think it also overturns a lot of our preconceived notions about language and travel and gender and power. I know that's something we'll talk more about later on in the book club.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, you've commented on it being a weird summer book club pick because it's not a beach read, but that's also part of what I liked about it. It overturns our expectations of what a summer read can be. And the English translation is often billed as a book about travel, but even that is somewhat misleading. So while the English title is flights, the Polish translation actually means something more like runners. And in Polish, it refers to this religious sect that believes you can ward off evil through movement. And this is obviously a different vibe and meaning to the word flights, and we'll discuss more about that in our episode on translation. But the theme of movement does carry through both translations and is central to the novel. And there's this quote I love early on in the book where the narrator says, Clearly, I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so when you linger in a place, you start to put down roots. I've tried a number of times, but my roots have always been shallow. I don't know how to germinate. My energy derives from movement, from the shuttering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains and ferries rocking.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and the novel does actually cover a lot of ground by plane and train and ship and more. And we travel to Poland, Philly, Russia, Australia, many different places around the world. But ultimately, I think the journey actually feels more psychological than geographical. I mean, it takes us into the mind of a Dutch anatomist who's experiencing Phantom Limb after his leg has been amputated. It takes us into the world of this runaway woman who's part of an obscure religious sect that promotes perpetual motion as a way of life. And ultimately, I think it does what the best kind of travel does. It takes us out of our comfort zone and into the worlds of others.
SPEAKER_04Yes. And one of the things that also drew me to the book early on was Tokarchuk describing her studies as a psychology student and her perspective on what psychology can and can't tell us about who we are and who we can become. And I feel like that type of challenge also takes us out of our comfort zone. And I felt like this is exactly what we're trying to do with this book club is not just explore a story, but really try and take these ideas and figure out what they mean in the context of what we do. Some people are professional behavioral scientists running experiments. And can Tokarchuk's writing complicate their thinking? She's kind of throwing down the gauntlet a bit about what the limits and possibilities of psychology are. And I felt like that was perfect for discussion and thinking. And also, I think one of the things that I love about both literature and science is they upend your expectations. And so Tokarczyk, very early on in the book, is doing both, upending my expectations of what a novel can be, and upending my expectations of what psychology can do.
SPEAKER_02I love that. Okay, so this is probably a good time to talk about the author. What can you tell us about Olga Tokarczyk?
SPEAKER_04Olga Tokarczyk is a Polish writer who is known for her constellation-style novels, as she calls them, that bend and challenge traditional methods of storytelling. She's also known for these rich and imaginative explorations of Polish history and Central European history. And in her work, despite challenging the idea of what a novel can be, you can actually find the influence of some of the oldest forms of storytelling, myths and fables, have had a large impact on her work. And other influences include the sciences, and so you'll find psychology, evolution, ecology, and astronomy have also played a big role in her novels. And in total, she's written 10 novels. Flights was actually her seventh novel, and it was published in Poland in 2007. But it actually took 10 years for an English translation to come out. Publishers weren't sure how readers would respond to this kind of imaginative storytelling. In other words, they didn't know if they could sell it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, I actually heard that her translator, Jennifer Croft, went around pitching flights to English language publishers and getting rejected for years, which is kind of wild when you think about it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so it actually sat in limbo for 10 years, despite having won Poland's top literary prize, the Nikkei Award, when it came out. And then when it finally did come out in English translation, it immediately won the Mann Booker International Prize, which is a very prestigious award for fiction. And Tokarczyk's writing has won a number of other awards as well. She actually won the Nikkei Poland Stop Literary Prize twice. And most notably, of course, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.
SPEAKER_01Hello, Olga Tokarczyk speaking.
SPEAKER_03Oh hello. My name is Adam Smith. I'm speaking from Nobel Prize.org, the website of the Nobel Prize. Many congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much. I am in the car still, and I cannot, you know, um really drive, and I have to be in the evening in Villa.
SPEAKER_03So how did you hear the news?
SPEAKER_01Um I would like to to reach a maybe place somewhere, a hotel or whatever. Um just to take my time to to react for reaction.
SPEAKER_03Of course. No, being being caught on the side of the road is hardly the most convenient thing. In the in the citation, the the Swedish Academy talk about the crossing of boundaries as a form of life, and that seems to apply particularly to you at this precise moment.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but really. Because I'm really on the way, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Wow, that is so cool. I had no idea she found out while she was literally traveling on the road.
SPEAKER_04How fitting, right? And I love how she talks about getting to a stable place versus just getting to where she's going. If I ever won the Nobel Prize, I would probably just say, I'll call you when I get to my hotel. But she seems to have these categories of stable places and places of motion. Okay, returning to her backstory. Tokartyk was born in 1962 in what was then communist Poland, and her parents were both teachers, and she grew up in the countryside of first Western Poland and then southern Poland, and she talks about how Poland in the 60s at that time was kind of a different world. So she says that lemons were a luxury and that she had no idea what a banana tasted like. Private cars weren't common, so if you wanted to take uh a trip even to somewhere pretty close by, it was this this kind of expedition or this journey. And as she was growing up, perhaps unsurprisingly, for someone who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, reading and writing were always a part of her life. Her father actually managed the school library, and she said that encyclopedias were her favorite literary genre during her childhood. She calls it her first constellation reading matter.
SPEAKER_02What a wonderful way to describe the structure of an encyclopedia. I can just imagine her jumping from people to places to events and making all these cool connections.
SPEAKER_04And of course, we find out early on in flights, she, or at least her narrator, still has an affinity for encyclopedias. In this case, the 21st century version we all know, Wikipedia. But she was also fascinated by biology and the connection and relationships between living things. And she was very interested in astronomy too. And she said at one point after winning the Nobel Prize that she imagined being this cosmic physician.
SPEAKER_00So I remember myself dreaming about to be a part of a cosmic expedition and work in science, checking how the human body is relating with uh with cosmic space. So it was a very fantastic idea.
SPEAKER_04Eventually, when she enrolled in university, her interest turned to psychology and specifically clinical psychology. And that had a big influence on her writing. Here's her describing some of the ways that psychology influenced her as a novelist.
SPEAKER_00I think that it was a good choice to study psychology. Of course, I was temptated by my mother to study literature, even if she knew from the beginning that I am I wanted to write. But psychology taught me very many important things. I think the one most important one that there is that every single human being is the source of a novel. So we are living in a world that like more or less five billions of stories, novels in potential state existing still around us. But the second the second reason why studying psychology was a very good choice is that this training as a psychotherapist taught me how to listen to people. It's a kind of ability you can really train and then you can be open much more for what the people saying to you.
SPEAKER_04Stephanie, you're a novelist and essayist. What do you make of this idea that there are five billion novels waiting in a potential state and the importance of listening to both psychology and writing?
SPEAKER_02I love that. I think it's such a lovely way of looking at the world, or I mean listening to it. I've actually been thinking about that idea a lot because much of my writing is interested in oral histories and the ways in which so many lives and people on the periphery of official history slip through its cracks. So I do think everyone has a story. Um, but we live in an increasingly noisy world that often doesn't stop to listen to those who live on its margins. And I think that's actually partly why Tukarczyk is so interesting to me, because she's often writing about these strange stories and forgotten histories. What are some of the themes that jumped out to you from her writing?
SPEAKER_04Well, there are a lot of themes in her writing, but one of the central ones has to be travel and movement, which she talks about in her interview with the Nobel Prize organization in a way that I really find interesting.
SPEAKER_00I do believe that we, all of us, we have somewhere in our perhaps genes or our psyche, we have this nomadian, nomadic instinct which uh creates our lives. And even if we are living entire life in one place, so we're still thinking about just crossing those places where we are designed to be. But uh and the this this deep need is very also very present in my life. So writing flights, I try to write a kind of monography of movement on many levels from this touristic level side for pilgrimage for also kind of neurotic, you know, uneasiness to go somewhere to check somewhere, just to also missing places we've never been before, which also creates our lives in a very visible way.
SPEAKER_04This idea that movement is something we have a drive to do, even if we live our whole lives in one place, is really fascinating to me. The idea that, say, a few centuries ago in a village, and even if you couldn't leave or didn't leave, your mind still wondered what was out there. And this wondering was sort of fed by fables and myths and fairy tales of distant or imaginary places. So there was psychological travel, even if there wasn't as much physical travel, which comes back to the psychological point you make about flights.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's like the adventure impulse, which is in itself an interesting tension, because I think it's actually quite natural to both have a longing for, but also a fear of change and stepping out of our comfort zones, like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.
SPEAKER_04Right. There's also the idea of borders that appears and reappears throughout her writing.
SPEAKER_00I was born close to the German border, then I now live in close to Czech border, and my family was uh was the part of this big uh political changing of borders after the Second War. So they were refugees from one part of Poland territory to the other gain after the Second War. So the the story about borders were very present in my childhood and also in my own life. Um but also it is the this subject is fascinating because of from this abstract side. Yeah, borders are challenged for us, but we also feel very deeply the deep need to cross the borders. It's something I remember myself living in this small village. There was a there is a still old border in the forest, and I used to take my dogs and went to the forest just for crossing the border, for clear, plain pleasure, for the joy that I am a free person, and the border in fact doesn't exist in a real sense. And of course, uh in especially in Jacob's book, I would like to relate to the the previous concept of Poland as a multicultural country, as a society speaking many languages, which we completely lost after the Second World. So this is also something uh deep, deep need to rebuild the old image of Poland.
SPEAKER_04You know, I can picture her crossing the border for the fun of it, and I can almost see the forest where she's doing it. For a year, I lived in a village on the Czech-German border, way up in the northern part of the country, in the village of Lobendowa Severny. It's a place Czechs haven't even heard of. And on the border there, there are trails in the forest where you can hike and bike and essentially just go from one country to the other. And where I was living, the border was marked by these sort of, I think they were granite just sort of stones in the ground, almost like breadcrumbs sort of weaving their way through the trees. And the markings indicated which side is which. And when when we went out for a ride, we would almost just try and see how many times we could cross the border and zigzag in and out of Germany in the Czech Republic. And also on the Polish-Czech border, it's very similar. So there are trails where you can hike and bike, and in the winter you can ski and you can go in and out of the Czech Republic and Poland, and there are these great little pubs or huts on the border where everyone, you know, Czechs and Poles and Slovaks and Germans grab a beer or a coffee or a hot wine, depending on the season. And today, most people sort of return to their side. Um, but in the past, of course, all of these villages that were around the border might have been one of these ethnicities. And the borders were sort of the borders that we think of today were much more fluid, and there were different ethnicities living and moving across those areas. And the people had a completely different notion of where a border was or wasn't.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that sounds like such a fun hike going back and forth. And I've actually been thinking about borders a lot too, partly because my own family has done a lot of border crossing over the generations. As you know, I was born in New York, but now I live in England. And my grandparents actually grew up in southern China, and my parents grew up in Hong Kong. And several years ago, I learned that the border between those two regions was very fluid. And it didn't actually even come into force until the late 1900s, which was news to me. Uh, because of course everyone had family on both sides, and they shared the same cultural and ethnic family roots. So, you know, for the most part, locals worked and traded and basically lived their lives as though the border didn't exist. Um this is actually why my grandparents were able to flee China to Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded, and then they just returned to the mainland afterwards. And it wasn't until the Cold War politics and other colonial issues kicked in that people were actually prevented from crossing back and forth. And it actually became a huge problem for Chinese refugees who weren't able to flee the Great Famine.
SPEAKER_04Wow, there's a lot of parallels there with how Tokarczyk talks about how the Polish border was constructed where she grew up by post-war politics and the way that impacted her family. In a book event with her translator Jennifer Croft for the GBH Forum Network in Boston, she said this.
SPEAKER_00This is the quintessence of the Central European history. So in fact we are all emigrant there. We are everybody living there kam personally or our fathers and ancestors came on this place. Må det biga part of Polish society are emigrants från samware. Especially I belong to sharf a family that we were moving from the eastern part of Poland to the western part, and had to root ja for the rest for the next generation, there.
SPEAKER_04One final theme in her writing that I want to bring up is interconnectedness. That we should be looking for connections and relationships rather than dividing things and seeing things as separate or individual. In her speech at the Nobel Banquet, she says.
SPEAKER_02It feels so central to what we're trying to do with this book club, and also the heart of her novel, Flights, that idea of the constellation.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's a central metaphor that Tokarchuk refers to in her writing and when she speaks about flights. This idea that she's not trying to create this sort of linear cause and effect story, but to bring out the pieces, lay them next to each other, and then see what connections and relationships form. And there's so much we could say about that, but for now let's just present the metaphor of a constellation as a useful way to read the book. This is actually how she thought about it when she first started writing Flights.
SPEAKER_00For me, this book is 12 years old because it was the process of writing it was uh more or less between 2004-2006. And at the time I had a kind of uh very special moment in my life. I realized that it I have to change something. This is very um obvious when you pass for your forties, that this is uh the the the sign of the perhaps crisis or something like that.
SPEAKER_04This was around the time she was going through a divorce.
SPEAKER_00And I decided having a passport, which is not so obvious for us from Central Europe. Uh, but at that time we had our passports, Poland was a part of European Union and the borders were open for us, so I decided to just go and travel as far as it is possible. And then I desperately wanted to write about my traveling, but I desperately looking for a form how to put into words my entire experience of travelling, and of course I had a classical form of such a memoirs of from traveling. Reportage is another klassika form. But everything was not suitable for my experience. So I thought that travelling is not just travelling on the ground anymore. It is rather jumping from one point to the other. It is like a zipping on the with pilot with television, changing a channel all the time. And yesterday, no, today in the morning I was in Washington DC. Today I am in Boston. So this is a kind of jumping. So this book is devotad to this feeling. The travelling as a jumping, the travelling as a very quick change changes. And trying to collect all those small detail experiences into one pattern. So I invented this constellation novel. As I used to say about this, it perhaps it sounds funny. But my first image was a kind of metaphor. When you are staying on the porch during the night and you are looking above, and then you can see the sky full of bright points, and you can you you you can see those those uh stars. And in fact, this is a chaotic order. But our brain, our mind perceiving this chaotic order in a kind of shapes, in a constellation, and behind those constellations there is an entire tradition of our civilization of our culture so the mythological stories, meanings, senses and so on. So this book was designed as a constellation full of small spots, brightening spots like small text, and it is just dedicated to you, to the reader, to do something with your mind with an entire collection of those spots.
SPEAKER_04Okay. Well, that's all for today. We should add that these are just our thoughts as two travel guides on the same journey as everyone else who's reading this book. Um, so we're not speaking from a position of authority, we're speaking from a position of people who are on the journey with you.
SPEAKER_02Right. Yeah. Although we will, in fact, be speaking to experts on subjects of travel and anatomy. We ourselves are just fellow travelers. So think about it as we're pointing out some signposts, some stars, sharing the handholds we found helpful while climbing up a particularly wonky section of mountain. And the way that we are thinking about it is here are some reading maps. You're welcome to use them as you navigate the novel and as you start asking your own questions.
SPEAKER_04Over the next few weeks, we'll be inviting guest experts across the arts and sciences to join our conversations. We'll ask them questions like: what is the history of a cabinet of curiosities? Is travel psychology really a thing? And what do anatomy and travel have to do with each other?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and also like what's lost and or gained in translation.
SPEAKER_04And of course, we're excited to hear from you too. Join the discussion via the Behavioral Scientist Reads WhatsApp community. If you're not already signed up, check out the book club website for more information. Stephanie, what's our discussion question this week?
SPEAKER_02So, this week, we want to hear from you. In the spirit of our collective scavenger hunt, what's a quote or section you found or discovered that moved or surprised you, or raised a question? Let us know. We look forward to hearing from you.
SPEAKER_04This episode was produced and edited by Stephanie Tam and mixed by Phil Bodger. Our theme music was composed by Nina Humphries. Thank you to the Kahneman Treesman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University for sponsoring Behavioral Scientist Reads and helping to make this podcast possible. You can subscribe to Behavioral Scientist Reads on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also find us at Behavioralscientist.org and our special book club website, bookclub.behavioral scientists.org, to discover all our episodes, extra material, and leave feedback. Don't forget to rate and review us. It will help other people discover the podcast.
