Paul Rand: What does it mean to truly know yourself? Can we ever really determine our sense of self and our identity or does who we are change over time?

Eric Oliver: One of the most common misconceptions that we have about the self is that it’s a thing, that it’s some fixed static entity. And that, I think, reflects this intuitive notion of self as a singular, stable, and maybe even eternal soul that we carry around.

Paul Rand: That’s Eric Oliver, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of the new book, How To Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.

Eric Oliver: If you look at your physicality, there’s nothing static about you. We are dynamic beings from on the molecular level, from the cellular level, even the psychological level. Our consciousness is continually updated every millisecond by electrical impulses coursing through our neurons. There is nothing static about us.

Paul Rand: Oliver is a political scientist by training, but he was also interested in exploring themes across philosophy, Greek mythology, physics, and popular science to better understand this idea of who you really are.

Eric Oliver: And I realized if I was trying to figure out myself, well, there seemed to be just 50 different people speaking 50 different languages. And I was wondering, “Well, how can I bring all these things together?” And so that’s, in some ways, when I started teaching this class.

Paul Rand: Oliver has been teaching a popular University of Chicago class called The Intelligible Self for more than two decades. And the class he brings together philosophical ideas and modern science to help his students to explore their own sense of identity.

Eric Oliver: One of the things I ... A question I pose to my students here is, okay, you have all of these stories that comprise your life. How many of these stories are ones that you’re the author of versus they’re stories that are requested to you?

Paul Rand: And the stories that we tell ourselves can ultimately shape a lot of who we perceive ourselves to be. And that can sometimes come with a lot of moral judgment.

Eric Oliver: More importantly, we start internalizing those norms psychologically. We start evaluating our own behavior by to what extent we’re living up to those norms or not living up to those norms. And we evolved psychological capacities. Feelings of guilt and anxiety are oftentimes ways that we’re monitoring ourselves relative to the demands of the group.

Paul Rand: This reality may explain why so many of us end up in therapy at some point in our lives or why so many of us search for self-help books to get through a particularly hard time.

Eric Oliver: I think what I ended up concluding in the book is, yes, we need to recognize what’s going on, but then we have to take the next step of letting go. And in some ways, this requires something that’s, for lack of a better term, we could call spiritual discipline. It’s a willingness to say, “Okay, every moment is an opportunity for me to redress and imbalance here.” And a lot of that time means just letting go of these habitual thoughts, making a commitment to exploring my own emotions and seeing those painful and challenging experiences as teachers, as opportunities for learning more about my own self-processes, not just as things to run away from.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, where we explore the groundbreaking research and the discoveries that are changing our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. On today’s episode, the scientific process of knowing yourself and discovering who you really are.

Today’s episode of Big Brains is supported by the Court Theatre, Hyde Park’s Tony Award-winning theater located on the University of Chicago campus. Here, timeless stories speak to today’s world. From Sophocles to Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill to Anton Chekhov, and August Wilson to Tennessee Williams. When you’re at Court Theatre, you know you’re going to see something bold and provocative, something that will move you and make you think. You know you’re going to get a great theatrical experience unlike anything else, one that only could happen on the south side of Chicago. Reimagine what Court Theatre can be. Visit Court Theatre, that’s courttheatre.org.

You describe this book as an odd hybrid with philosophy, popular science, intellectual history, and then you call it a thinking person’s self-help. Tell me why all these pieces, which normally don’t show up in the self-help aisle of books, is such an important part and approach for you.

Eric Oliver: Well, I think it reflects in some ways my own personal journey into this. So as I write in the book, when I was in high school, I had a great English teacher who wrote know thyself on the blackboard. And she said, “These two words basically crystallized the cumulative wisdom of the ancient Greeks. And if we wanted to live a full, meaningful life, we had to know ourselves.” And I took her very seriously. So I probably spent the first 30 years of my life looking at all of these different avenues to try to get a handle on what’s behind this experience.

And I realized if I was trying to figure out myself, well, there seemed to be just 50 different people speaking 50 different languages. And I was wondering, “Well, how can I bring all these things together?” And so that’s, in some ways, when I started teaching this class here at U of C, and I cobbled together this course with all these eclectic interests, and I wasn’t sure how the class would go. And the students seemed to get a lot out of it. So I kept offering it year after year. And I realized, oh, this was really maybe the approach is to try to put philosophy and eastern spiritual traditions and modern science all in conversation with each other.

Paul Rand: Connect this path for me of how did a political science professor come up with the idea of teaching the intelligible self and why is it okay for you to do that because it’s outside of political science?

Eric Oliver: Every year, my students ask me this, like, “Why is this a political science class? We don’t spend a lot of time talking about political science.” I say, “Well, because I’m in a political science department.” So that’s the short answer to that question. And in a lot of ways, this class really reflects the ethos of the University of Chicago, which is as this multidisciplinary place where we don’t really respect disciplinary boundaries.

I think of a variety of reasons. One is just my own personal quest to try to figure out who I am. And then I had this moment that really crystallized for me, which was about 12 years ago after having taught the class for a few years, I was reading these essays on Freud, and it was the same essay I had been reading for years and years. And I quite frankly was just getting tired of it.

Paul Rand: Yep.

Eric Oliver: And I went to my students, I said, “Listen, you guys are super smart. I know you know what Freud says and I know what Freud says. I don’t want you to just regurgitate Freud to me. I want you to tell me what Freud tells you about yourself.” And once we made their own lived experience, the subject of the class, the class really went to another level.

Paul Rand: Sounds like it. Yep.

Eric Oliver: And that was very transformative. And I think there’s a real hunger for this in modern education now. This type of class is beginning to show up in a lot of other universities independently of mine. And I think it speaks to this notion that a good part of education should be knowing how do we apprehend our own experience? How do we think about subjects like what is consciousness? What is love? How do I find purpose and meaning in life? And really taking those big questions that are so important for living well head on.

So one of the most common misconceptions that we have about the self is that it’s a thing, that it’s some fixed static entity. And that, I think, reflects this intuitive notion of self as a singular, stable, and maybe even eternal soul that we carry around. But if you look at your physicality, there’s nothing static about you. We are dynamic beings from on the molecular level, from the cellular level, even the psychological level. Our consciousness is continually updated every millisecond by electrical impulses coursing through our neurons. There is nothing static about us. And what that means is that we are not things, we are processes.

Paul Rand: Explain that word processes because that’s a loaded word in a lot of ways.

Eric Oliver: Yes. So once again, let me explain this. So what really differentiates us as living beings is that we are energy systems like everything else in the universe, but we are energy systems that are resisting entropy. That’s really what at our core defines this as a life.

Paul Rand:

And explain for folks what entropy is.

Eric Oliver: Entropy is the great degradation of energy that’s occurring in the universe. So at the beginning of the universe, in the timeless non-moment before the Big Bang, was the highest potential for something to happen. It was the potential for an entire universe. And ever since the Big Bang, we’ve been seeing a degradation of that potential. The universe doesn’t have enough high-potent energy to continue making stars and galaxies. At some point, it’s going to stop making them all together. And everything is ... This is the second law of thermodynamics and physics. And everything is headed towards this end, but there’s one thing that pushes back against that, and that’s life.

And to really want to know what yourself is, it actually stems from this weird fact about what it means to be alive in that the self are all the processes that negotiate between you as an energy system and reality. They’re all the things that are there to keep this flame of life going. It could be everything from your cellular metabolism is a part of yourself to the way your cognition gets organized, your emotions that arise to even your ... In our case, having names and identities and having a storyline for your life. All of these are parts of the self, and they’re all there to help negotiate with reality.

And even though sometimes it’s like, well, me sitting in front of the TV vegging out, how is that helping negotiate with reality? Well, it’s part of that whole process, too, even it may not seem like it’s necessary. And so what we mean by processes is that these things are continually getting updated. Every moment, you’re storing a memory. Every moment, you are changing. And one of the things that’s great about this is that we’re not stuck. It’s easy for us to sometimes get caught in this negative cycle of, “Oh, I’m a bad person,” or, “I’m an inherently flawed person,” or “That nobody likes me.” And think of ourselves as fixed in some ways, but we’re not fixed. As Buckminster Fuller said, “We’re not nouns, we’re verbs.” And what that means is that every moment is an opportunity to readjust these processes. They’re dynamic and they’re unfolding.

Paul Rand: The part that I was not expecting when you look at the title of the book is that I think I’m going to come in and I’m going to start learning about psychology or consciousness, but then you start thinking about, like you said, physics, energy, entropy, biology. And tell me why if you’re going to understand yourself, you really have to understand these components as a foundation.

Eric Oliver: If we want to optimize this self-process, if we want to fulfill our purpose, and in the book, I talk about Aristotle in this regard, that he said, “If we really want to fulfill our purpose in life, we have to know what our function is.” And, for example, a hammer’s function is to smash things. So a purpose-driven hammer is really good at smashing things. It would be excellent at it. And the Greeks loved excellence. And so they described this as eudemonia.

And so if we want to really live as well as we can, we really need to know our function. And to know our function, it does mean going at some level to these deeper levels. And so, for example, one of the ways that we need to function is in terms of our own cellular health. And that’s a little weird because, okay, we don’t see ourselves, but then how do we ensure our cellular health? Well, luckily now we have a lot of good advice about that. Getting enough sleep, eating right, exercise. All of these things manifest themselves in terms of your own cellular health. If you want to optimize yourself, you’ve got to start with the basics and this foundation, I think, is really, really key for having a more unencumbered consciousness.

And the way I like to describe it with my students is when you get that tingly feeling, when you get goosebumps, that electric charge, that’s actually always coursing through you. And most of the time, it’s just too subtle or we’re too distracted by our circumstance to really pay at mind. If we can let go of the ordinary distractions that compress us, these habitual mental routines that keep us locked into cycles of anxiety, or resentment, or preoccupations with the past or the future, and we can just quiet the mind down, this effervescence becomes manifest. It becomes available to us. And the more you can live in that effervescence, the better your life. It’s a really glorious way of being. And to understand yourself as an energy system is perhaps one way of tapping into that.

Paul Rand: If there’s a takeaway for me out of reading this section is that when people try to think their way out of problems that actually originate at a biological level, it’s not going to work. And that idea of fixing things, if that’s the right word, if you don’t understand the biology behind it, you’re not going to have success changing things that you’d like to possibly change.

Eric Oliver: Yes. And part of this relates to understanding what is behind thinking. And I talk about this in the book. Our animal brains evolved basically as prediction machines. They’re out there making maps of reality. Our sense organs are taking in all of this information. Our brains are constructing, for lack of a better word, a map of reality, and then predicting what’s going to happen next as a way of deciding what we should be doing. And the challenge with our brains as prediction machines is that they rely on routines. They rely on these neural habits in order to do this. And these accumulate for us over time.

And in relying on these neural habits, we shortchange ourselves. We get stuck in certain ways of being. Imagine just walking to work the same way every day, and then you stop noticing what’s actually going on around you. And so we oftentimes think that thinking is the end-all and be-all of our existence. It’s the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am notion, but not understanding that thinking is just this mechanism that’s helping us negotiate through the world, but it’s not the end-all, be-all, particularly our thoughts. And I described this in the book. A lot of times, I’m sitting, and if I’m, say, doing yoga or trying to meditate, and I’m getting bombarded by these intrusive thoughts, I try to stop and say, “Are these thoughts helping anything?”

And more often than not, they’re not. I think vast majority of my thoughts are not really making my life better in any considerable way. But if I don’t have a way of apprehending them, if I don’t have a lexicon for understanding what’s behind my thoughts, I’ll just get caught in them. They’ve seen the totality of my reality. And then once I’m able to think that, “Oh, that’s just me thinking, that’s just my brain generating a prediction of what it thinks is going to happen based on some old routines,” it gives me some distance from them. I’m not so compressed, and I can let go of them a little bit more. And the more I can let go of them, the more I can live in a space that’s both intentional, but not so encumbered by old habits of mind.

Paul Rand: As we go on from the biology, one of the things that distinguishes humans is that we don’t just live, but we start having language and telling stories. How does that come into the picture and fundamentally change the self?

Eric Oliver: I mean, language is a complete game changer for our species. It really is what separates us from all other living creatures. One, it allows us to reflect on ourselves as object of inquiry. I can now, with language ... I may have experience of I, but with language now, that experience of I becomes a me. And more importantly, that becomes a language of me with a lot of moral judgment attached to it. Am I a good me or a bad me? As I begin using language to apprehend the world, I also begin evaluating everything I’m apprehending relative to some subjective scale, myself included. So that’s one big way that language changes.

Another thing that language does is that it fundamentally shapes our social interactions. So here’s where political scientist comes in.

Paul Rand: Yep. Okay, got you.

Eric Oliver: And once we have language, however, we can alter that. We can set up rules, morals, and norms about how we’re going to organize ourselves. And more importantly, we start internalizing those norms psychologically. We start evaluating our own behavior by to what extent we’re living up to those norms or not living up to those norms. And we evolved psychological capacities, feelings of guilt and anxiety are oftentimes ways that we’re monitoring ourselves relative to the demands of the group, these moral demands that we’ve incorporated.

Paul Rand: Well, it’s interesting. One of the things you talk about is that many of us are really blind authors of our own distress, which gets into this idea. And I wonder what makes self-created suffering so hard for us to recognize and to deal with.

Eric Oliver: So this goes to a layer of self that I call the egoistic self. And the funny thing about an ego is that we all intuitively sense, okay, we know what an ego is, but the science of ego is pretty rudimentary. We don’t really know where in the brain our egos reside or what exactly an ego often is. And one way to think about the ego is all of these psychological mechanisms that are in place to help us negotiate with other people. It’s basically the suite of tools we use to make our way through society. And it includes all of the things that we think other people owe us, all the other things that we want from other people. We want recognition, we want to be adored, we want to be respected, but the ego is also there as a punishing mechanism, too.

If we stray and we do something that may put our status in danger, our ego lets us know. So we’ll feel bad. We can have shame, for example, as a part of the ego. Now, the challenge for this is that, unlike these other layers of the self that I’ve been describing, which we can apprehend scientifically, the ego does not lend itself to empirical inquiry. And the primary way that we know about our egos is through our stories. So what therapy basically, in a lot of ways, is examining your ego processes. And what do we do in therapy? Well, we go in, sit on the couch, and say, “Well, today, I did.” And you start telling stories and you start interpreting your stories.

And so what we’re doing when we’re apprehending our egos is really doing interpretive storytelling. And so one of the things I ... A question I pose to my students here is, “Okay, you have all of these stories that comprise your life. How many of these stories are ones that you’re the author of versus they’re stories that are requested to you?” And it’s important to know. I think a lot of our stories are ones that we’ve inherited. They come from our culture, they come from our parents. We are surrounded by myths and legends, and we’re very culturally inscribed in this way. And we internalize them, and we make them part of our own story.

So I think to have a happy life, for example, I have to meet some stereotype of the right job, the right marriage, and so on. But then there are the more bespoke individualized stories that we tell about ourselves, too.

Paul Rand: If you’re enjoying the discussions that we’re having on this program, there’s another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It’s called The Pie. Economists are always talking about the pie, how it grows and shrinks, how it’s sliced, and who gets the biggest share. Join veteran NPR host, Tess Vigeland, and she talks with leading economists about their cutting-edge research and key events of the day. Hear how the economic pie is at the heart of issues like the aftermath of a global pandemic, jobs, energy, policy, and much more.

Let me take a slight but connected detour because you made a comment a second ago about that’s the political scientist coming out. And I wonder if I can press on this political science point a little bit and talk about when did you start realizing that politics, whether it’s belief, or identity, or conflict, couldn’t be fully understood without understanding the self?

Eric Oliver: I think this actually started in college. So I spent my junior year of college in England, and I was working on a political campaign. This was during the 1987 elections that they were having. And I was out canvassing these council estates in working-class neighborhoods in England. And I was meeting all of these working-class voters who were very enthusiastic about the conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher. And I was ... At the time, I was a good little Marxist, and I thought everybody was oriented by class consciousness.

So I was really confused. I was like, “You guys are working class. Why are you supporting this person who’s not really in favor of the working class?” And so that, I think, started this lifelong interest and fascination about what drives our political beliefs. And my previous book, in a lot of ways, was an attempt to delve into this, this psychology of conspiracy theories and populism.

Paul Rand: We’ve talked about that.

Eric Oliver: Right. And what accounts for someone like Donald Trump. So I think there was always in my mind this notion of, yes, in political science, we study institutions, and we study these processes, but these are also constituted of individuals with their own psychological dynamics. And in some ways, to understand how politics works, you have to understand these psychological dynamics.

Now, those psychological dynamics, turns out, are very complicated, but the more we can begin to get into them, I think the better we can understand. And I was joking with my editor about this book, this is a book about how to know the self. And in a lot of ways, our political institutions and cultures are part of ourselves. We’ve constructed them. And I said, “Well, if I was going to delve into that, that’s going to be a totally different book.” And he said, “Well, let’s make this your second book.”

Paul Rand: Well, you talked even about yourself of really spending years looking through different ways of understanding, and I’m sure many folks can listen and understand their ideas of thinking through different self-help systems, or therapies, or even gurus, but people still feel stuck. How would you help people think about that?

Eric Oliver: Yes. And I think the answer is that there’s no simple answer. And I think part of the problem is that there’s this paradox in knowing yourself and addressing your own imbalances. At the one hand, you need to have a system for identifying where you’re out of alignment. So going back to yourself as a process of you as an energy system negotiating with reality, and it has two imperatives there.

On the one hand, you need to have order. If you’re going to have the flame of life to keep going, you’ve got to have regular routines to keep it fueled, to make sure it doesn’t burn out of control, to keep that flame of life going steadily. And then you have the flame of life itself. And I call these things order and vitality. And in biology, this is known as homeostasis. And ideally, if we want to live in our ideal way, we’re staying close to this homeostatic set point, this balance between order and vitality. And we could see this at a cellular level, we can see this at an animal level. And ideally, we’d like to see this at a social and political level.

We’d love to have our society organized so that we’re not constantly caught up in violence or exploitation, where we, as a society, would live both most efficiently and harmoniously. So where we’re not living according to that balance is where we’re off on our homeostatic set point. And that’s where the imbalances lie. And I think in terms of our personal experiences, where this typically becomes manifest is in chronic feelings of discontent, the anxieties that plague us, the resentments we hold onto, the depressions and the sadness that we carry around, the feeling of loneliness that a lot of us experience. And then the stories that we tell around that.

And at least that’s something that we can begin to interact with and deal with. And the first step in doing that is beginning to recognize the parameters of that and having a framework for understanding that. And we have some frameworks in place. We have very rich therapeutic tradition now in this country. We have psychology, there’s philosophy, there’s religion, but all of these also have their own pitfalls. So we can utilize these things, but at some point, this is after having spent many years in therapy, I would always ask my therapist, I’m like, “Okay, I think I know my processes pretty well now. How do I get them to get better?”

And my therapist, he just shrugged his shoulders and we keep going after it. And I think what I ended up concluding in the book is, yes, we need to recognize what’s going on, but then we have to take the next step of letting go. And in some ways, this requires something that’s, for lack of a better term, we could call spiritual discipline. It’s a willingness to say, “Okay, every moment is an opportunity for me to redress and imbalance here.” And a lot of that time means just letting go of these habitual thoughts, making a commitment to exploring my own emotions and seeing those painful and challenging experiences as teachers, as opportunities for learning more about my own self-processes, not just as things to run away from.

So at the slightest whip of discontentment, running to the fridge, or my phone, or the bar. And instead of trying to just do that, stop. And I think this is what the great wisdom traditions tell us is that the more we can engage in the moment and be open to the moment rather than simply reacting to it, that that’s really the path to unlearning all of these mental habits of rebalancing ourselves and living, as I described earlier, in a more effervescent and harmonious way.

Paul Rand: You talked about letting go, and I want to push on that a little bit more, but you also, when you’re talking about it in the book, linked letting go with recognition and love as a ways to progress onward. Tell me about how recognition and love and letting go all fit together.

Eric Oliver: So it’s interesting. One of the things I talk about in the class, and I had to write about in the book, is about love because we are a social species through and through. We are actually a social phenomena. Even at a cellular level, we’re comprised of two different species. Within ourselves are these mitochondria that have a different DNA programs for us. We have a microbiome. We are social beings. And particularly as primates and as mammals, we are very, very socially attuned.

In order to keep ourselves in balance, we need other people. If we are just thrust by ourselves, we will experience intense loneliness and psychological dysfunction as a consequence of that. And part of learning to live better is learning to treat yourself the way you would treat all the other people that you love in your life.

Paul Rand: Interesting. This may tie into this last point that you just made, but I’m wondering, you’ve been teaching this class for 20 years, you run into a student and maybe you have this from some consistency and they say, “You know what I really took out of that class or how that really helped me and what I try to remember most is X, Y, and Z.” What are the X, Y, and Z that you typically find people come back with and say, “That really stuck with me and really helped me.”

Eric Oliver: There are a lot of X’s, and Y’s, and Zs. And part of teaching this class is that when I ask my students to reflect on their own experience, the class gets very personal. And for a lot of them, it’s about coming to terms with their relationships with their families. Other times, it’s coming to terms with their dependence on medications or alcohol, or it could be just where do they find meaning and purpose in life?

So I don’t know if I have one answer to that because so many of the students have their ... They all seem to get different things out of it because this whole self is very complex. I think for me, though, the greatest satisfaction is I regularly get emails from old students who are saying, “Oh, I just read this book and I was thinking of you,” or “Just to let you know, I thought I was going to go take this job that I wasn’t really satisfied with, but I’m now going to go do something that I’m really passionate about. And I have the conviction that this is really what I should be doing. And it was something that maybe was a little more off the beaten path.” And that to me ... I say, “Well, I hope it works out.”

Paul Rand: Don’t blame me if it doesn’t.

Eric Oliver: Don’t blame me if it doesn’t. But at the same time, I feel like they’re at least on the right path. And that’s enormously gratifying when former students reach out and let me know that this exercise we went through made a positive difference for them.

Lea Ceasrine: Big Brains is a production of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. We’re sponsored by the Graham School. Are you a lifelong learner with an insatiable curiosity? Access more than 50 open enrollment courses every quarter. Learn more at graham.uchicago.edu/bigbrains. And if you like what you heard in our podcast, please leave us a rating and review. The show is hosted by Paul M. Rand and produced by me, Lea Ceasrine, with help by Eric Fey. Thanks for listening.