Uncertainty: The surprising gift of being unsure

No matter how much order, sense, or predictability we try to bring to our lives, uncertainty and the anxiety it can create are always there.

Researchers say, that’s actually a good thing.

Today, On Point: Learning to love uncertainty.

Maggie M. Jackson, journalist and author. Author of Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.

Excerpt from Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure by Maggie M. Jackson. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Part I

MAGGIE JACKSON (and others): All right, starting my hand warmers. Beth should be here any minute. The puddles are frozen. The sky is amazing. The deck is not too icy.

PERSON #2: No it's not.

JACKSON: Hey! We have a gorgeous morning.

PERSON #3: Good morning.

JACKSON: Oh my gosh. I thought I looked out the sky and it was just dull clouds. And then we turned, we went over the hill and it was, it's stunning.

PERSON #3: Yeah. Oh, look at that sky. It's a pink, orange, gray, lavender. Yeah. I mean, sometimes we get the total orange. Sometimes we get all yellow. The cloud’s look like moutnains with snow on them, don’t they?

PERSON #2: It’s the front range mountain. It is. I know. The sea can give you anything you’d like, Beth.

PERSON #3: Exactly. OK, I’m gonna swim over that way and go skiing.

PERSON #2: OK, Beth.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Maggie, that last voice there, someone named Beth, who is that?

MAGGIE JACKSON: Beth is originally from Colorado and she's a transplanted New Englander who we swim with every morning. She's one of my fellow we call ourselves the sea bears, and some people call themselves the mermaisons, but anyhow we're a conglomeration of people who come together to swim in the ocean four seasons a year.

CHAKRABARTI: In the ocean, so four seasons a year. Now you sent us this just yesterday after your morning swim in the Atlantic. I think yesterday it was, what, air temperature of 20 and water temperature of 43-ish?

JACKSON: Yes, with only a slight breeze, so we were really lucky. And a little sliver of sun, so again, we were really lucky.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay let's listen to a little bit more, after you go on this frigid swim. Maggie coming out of the water.

Oh. Cold. Semi, semi solid.

It is not warm.

Oh my god. My hands. That was not a complete success. Those glows.

They splat in too much water.

Oh man.

But we got a beautiful day.

CHAKRABARTI: Beautiful and half frozen like a human sized ice cube. This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti, and Maggie Jackson is our guest today. And regardless of temperature or unpredictable currents, ocean swimming is something Maggie does.

Every day, right? Seven days a week?

JACKSON: Just about.

CHAKRABARTI: Seven days a week. Obviously, there are health benefits to it, but in order to plunge herself out of a state of comfort and into uncertainty, that is another benefit she experiences from ocean swimming four seasons a year. And purposefully embracing a state of uncertainty, it's the subject of Maggie's new book.

It's called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. Maggie, welcome to On Point.

JACKSON: Thank you. It's great to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. When I first read that you swim in the North Atlantic, essentially in the middle of winter, I was like, why? Why do you do it?

JACKSON: It really started, I've always been an ocean swimmer, but more of a pool swimmer for exercise, ocean for fun.

And when the pandemic came, the pools closed. So we actually moved out of the city and to Rhode Island. And so I became eager to do this form of exercise which was really my thing longer and longer into the season and then bought the wetsuit and then bought the gloves and et cetera, et cetera.

So I found it joyful. We find it exhilarating. It is great exercise in itself. But then I began to also realize that we were constantly on the edge. And that was part of the wonder and the discomfort and the excitement of it all.

CHAKRABARTI: So for those people who haven't been ocean swimming, what brings you, what are the factors that make you feel like you're on the edge?

Sure, you can be in your warm, cozy house and be looking at the app that tells you the wavelength due to the probabilistic modeling, etc. You can know the beach, you can know the conditions there, and you get there, and it can be completely different or at least a little bit different. You really never know exactly what you're going to get.

And then when you enter the water, of course, it's all changing. We actually swim a little bit before the sun comes up often and it's amazing. The sun rising has an instant, near instant effect on the ocean itself, which is absolutely fascinating. I've grown to learn. And so you are looking for spots, which are dicey, churning spots, etc.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah. So what you're saying is the data that you can gather beforehand will never perfectly match the conditions that you're swimming in.

JACKSON: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so that, and that lends you a sense of exhilaration because a lot of people would say because I can't know for sure. I don't want to do it.

JACKSON: Exactly.

But you're on the edge of what you know, you have a grounding, you do know the conditions, you have a little bit of the data, but you're at the edge where basically not anything can happen, a 40-foot tsunami, et cetera, but you're living in the moment in an improvisational way and learning as you go, even in those 20, 30 minutes of the swim. You're completely not knowing quite what will happen even though you have an expectation.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, but so tell me about what you're feeling in that moment or how it changes your perspective of being in that moment. And if that's also had an impact on how you see other things that you're not quite so sure of.

JACKSON: Exactly. I really puzzled over why exactly I loved it so much, because I actually don't like the cold and I don't love high waves, etcetera.

But I found that I realized that this not knowing, this sort of daily dose of uncertainty was strengthening me in ways. Hence the laughter, hence the joy, hence the banter. We really feel, I remember a fellow during the pandemic kind of stopped to talk to us as we were in our wetsuits. He was not, but he said, doesn't it make you feel so alive?

He knew exactly what we were doing. And that's what it is. You're constantly on the edge. And it makes me feel as though I can, I'm capable of dealing with what life throws at me the rest of the day. I feel as though the not knowing what the ocean holds, it's changed my perspective on swimming, on the ocean, on exploring or throwing myself into something new.

It's just made unpredictability a little bit more the norm and in a wonderful way. Because that is what life is. And I'm learning in every moment. I feel as though I'm totally, utterly alive when I'm doing it.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. I'll just put out there that for people who aren't ocean swimmers and think about wanting to do it, first of all, do it with people who know how to do it. Because mother nature is all powerful.

So maybe you don't want to just plunge in without a group of knowledgeable experienced folks around you. Cause I was remembering many years ago, I spent a summer in La Jolla, California. Right next door to San Diego. So it was a summer there and I was on the beach every day. And one day I went out to swim.

There was a buoy about maybe a fifth of a mile out. So I was like making my way out there. The water depth wasn't that great. It was like maybe six to seven feet at that point, but this wave came out of nowhere and just pounded me down, and my head hit the sand at the bottom of that stretch of ocean.

And I popped back up and I was like, it was a reminder that Mother Nature always wins.

JACKSON: And isn't that what life is? We are actually not as in control as we might think we are every day.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But this is why your book is so provocative. Because the recognition of the limits of our control, and then pushing ourselves into the state of uncertainty that comes with that recognition.

You write in the book that it's a source of strength, right? First of all, I suppose we should [explain what] you do mean by the certain types of uncertainty in the book.

JACKSON: think it's important to add that people, experts, there's a lot of debate about different types of uncertainty. You can find different definitions in economics, et cetera. But mainly we can talk about two main types of uncertainty.

One is alleatory so called uncertainty, and that's the unknown, that's a shorthand for the unknown, what we cannot know, you really, despite the app, do not know, whether the waves will rise or fall in the next half hour, etc. But then there is our uncertainty or epistemic uncertainty, psychological uncertainty, you might call it, and that's the human response to the unknown.

And some people define it as recognizing the limits of what you know. It's a moment. It's not full-blown ignorance. It's not, the blank slate I might have for particle physics. It's basically being unsure. And also recognizing that something could be this way or could be that way. So it's being on that edge, as I mentioned.

CHAKRABARTI: So to be clear, the aleatory uncertainty you're talking about was simply the fact that there are limits to our knowledge.

JACKSON: The alleatory uncertainty is really what we cannot know.

CHAKRABARTI: We just simply can't know.

JACKSON: It's the unknowns that we face every single day. Whereas epistemic uncertainty is the recognition that we reached the limits of our knowledge.

CHAKRABARTI: And at that moment, we don't know, but we're unsure. We're uncertain. And this can, and so the epistemic side is what you're focusing on?

JACKSON: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: And it can involve anything from just maybe small situations in life to the great unknowns in our life, right?

JACKSON: Absolutely. It can be, epistemic uncertainty can be if you cast a wide net, moments' daydream when you're casting yourself from the here and now and launching into the what if scenarios of what's going to happen tomorrow. And uncertainty can be the deliberative space that a surgeon in a high stakes crisis will inhabit so that then they can problem solve with a situation that they haven't sensed, seen before.

And so uncertainty can come, I think it's really important, an important point that uncertainty can take on a lot of different modes and types. That's something we need to talk about more in our society today.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Maggie, we told On Point listeners a couple of days ago that we were going to be talking to you today about uncertainty, and they sent us so many stories about moments of uncertainty in their lives and how it had an impact on them, so I just want to listen to a couple of them.

We'll hear from more folks later in the show, but first of all, this is Heidi from Johnston, Iowa.

HEIDI: And I'm sure just about every person in the United States who has ever went through a divorce faced a lot of uncertainty, can I run a household by myself? Can I pay for my whole life by myself?

Can I take care of my kids and pay for them by myself? And I would say that over the 10 years I have finally figured out. Yes, I can do this all by myself. And so uncertainty helped me find myself and grow.

CHAKRABARTI: That is so inspiring, Heidi. I say more power to you. Here's another one. This is Awan, who called us from Brookline, Massachusetts.

And he says his life has been full of uncertainty. He's an immigrant from Taiwan. He started two different businesses in the United States. He's faced or facing financial hardship.

And yet, Awan says uncertainty has actually been his guide.

AWAN: Uncertainty pushes us to try something new. You have the freedom to try something that you cannot do in your stable life.

That is the best part of the uncertainty. You don't need an excuse to force yourself to do something different. It's already different. For me, uncertainty gave me a chance to recalibrate my life goals. It makes me a rolling stone that prevents me from gathering more seeds.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Awan from Brookline, Massachusetts, and Maggie, your jaw just dropped there.

JACKSON: I just love the life wisdom there and the fact that Heidi and Awan, through very difficult circumstances, I imagine, found that uncertainty strengthens them. And I do hear from many people, we have a very negative view of uncertainty often, and studies bear that out, especially of leaders, or political leaders or business leaders.

We think of uncertainty as weakness and synonymous with paralysis, particularly even when I was beginning to shift the book I was writing on thinking towards uncertainty. Because the uncertainty story wanted to be told, I felt reluctant myself. Because I felt as though it was just this abyss or a monolithic darkness.

And yet I found that not only does it have this spurring, provocative, provoking, I call it the gadfly of the mind effect on us. If we let it, if we inhabit, if we harness it. But also, it has, there's very much more to the story than just one black fog of uncertainty.

CHAKRABARTI: So I'd like to learn from you more about what's actually happening in the brain. When we're experiencing these states of uncertainty, because one would think that human beings would be wired to try to reduce uncertainty, right? Because maybe the common assumption would be that the more certain we can be of things, the more able we are to survive.

Let's just say. But that may not necessarily be true. So what's happening neurologically with uncertainty.

JACKSON: Right. And then your question drives straight to the heart of why we dislike uncertainty. And yet why it is so beneficial for humanity, so essential for humanity. We humans and many organisms are built to need and want answers.

That's why, that's how we survive, as you point out. But when we meet something new and unexpected and murky, we have a kind of stress response related to uncertainty. We realize, we recognize with the limits of our knowledge. We recognize suddenly that we don't know. Is that a tiger in the tree or just a shadow, etc.

And so at that point you might have a bodily physiological stress response, your heart might beat, or your palms might sweat. But at the same time, in the brain, there are cascading changes due to the release of stress hormones and neurotransmitters, etc. So your brain becomes more active in sharing information between regions. Your working memory is bolstered, your focus is heightened, they call it, some scientists call it focused arousal.

So at that moment, you're on your toes, you're gaining a kind of wakefulness. And one neuroscientist, Joseph Cable, told me the brain at that moment is telling itself there's something to be learned here. So you can see, I actually wrote in one draft of the book that this is an epic chance to move from routine and automaticity.

I got some pushback from my agent, epic. And I said, no, this really is an epic human chance to move forward into what we can know further about the world.

CHAKRABARTI: But so the sort of cascading neural response you're talking about sounds somewhat like flight or fight. Is it different from what's happening in those situations?

JACKSON: It's related, but I'll say a minute, that in a minute, this is not a fear-based response. This is not, it's very much an unconscious, very basic response, a stress response, but it actually is called by some scientists, good stress. So it is a way in which your system is revving up for performance.

Your blood is circulating toward areas of the brain. In fact, the brain is funneling energy to itself at that moment. That is what happens when we have, when we're going into approach mode. If you are fearful, at that moment, you have a very different systemic effect when you're fearful of either the uncertainty or perhaps what it is you're about to do when you expect that this is going to be a disaster.

Then you have the blood circulatory system begins to funnel blood away from your extremities, including your brain, actually. So you're actually moving more into a kind of shutdown mode, a fear-based shutdown mode instead of a performance mode.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I want to just hear from another listener really quickly. Because it's starting to make sense then why we got the kinds of responses that we got.

For example, here's Kirk. He's from Eastern Oregon.

KIRK: For me, uncertainty is a chance to work on patience. For me, uncertainty is a chance to believe, slow down and show up to my soul and trust that the process will work. And not probably overfunction.

CHAKRABARTI: Isn't that interesting, Maggie, because we're talking about actually a high period of activity in the brain, right?

When facing uncertainty. You described it very well. But in terms of how people experience it consciously, Kirk says it's almost a chance to pause while processing that uncertainty.

JACKSON: Exactly. And that is part two, if you will, of the uncertainty story, because uncertainty is this spur, it is an invitation to learn, it's being poised on the edge of what you do not yet know.

And then, and yet at the same time, it's also a space, it is a space, is slowing down, a pausing. You are having a sort of disconnection from instant immediate action and from instant automatic thoughts. You are actually, the brain and the body are telling itself that this is a time to put away that routine, to break, to reassess, to pivot.

And yet, then you can enter the space that uncertainty is. I think we need to develop a whole new vocabulary about uncertainty, but it is both a noun, and it's also, I call it wisdom in motion. And one neuroscientist told me it's the chance for a thing, for life to take a turn in a different direction, just as Kirk was saying.

So once we can enter uncertainty, then we can begin to understand, investigate the different diagnostic options in the medical situation. Or are the pros and cons to taking that new job? You have to be remaining in uncertainty in order to investigate, deliberate, daydream, et cetera.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I'm hearing you describe a state of like positive contemplation almost. Which we'll talk a little bit later about how to welcome that state more frequently in our lives. But since you mentioned medicine, you have, the book abounds with examples of fear of uncertainty and then trying to change that fear into something else.

Can you tell us the story of Maine Medical that you talk about in your book and how young doctors fresh out of med school sometimes do feel a high degree of uncertainty?

JACKSON: Yes, exactly. It's very common for people, especially in professions, to rest on what they know. We hone these over thousands of hours, et cetera, life experience and practice. We hone the ability to come up with solutions to situations that we've already seen before. At the same time the novice is looking for those model solutions, for life to be a textbook.

At Maine Medical Center, the head faculty of the residency program in family medicine began to see that many of the young doctors were highly uncomfortable with uncertainty. And yet family medicine is the most suffused with uncertainty.

CHAKRABARTI: I was going to say, medicine overall, but especially family medicine, it's like a whole sea of things that you can't exactly predict, but you have to do the best you can with the knowledge that you have. In a sense, that actually did surprise me. I'm like, are we not training young doctors in med school that a fact of life is the human body is complex and you may not know the answers to everything?

But anyway, continue with telling us about what happened.

JACKSON: Like many professions, I think certainty seeking is very much the predominant theme.

And uncertainty is something, as in for the rest of us, something to basically to quash and move on to.

CHAKRABARTI: I will say that as patients, sorry to jump in, but we probably put inordinate pressure on doctors by always asking them for the answer or what is the right treatment.

So some of that pressure is coming from the outside. But go ahead.

JACKSON: It's a two-way street. Yeah. They began to see rising discomfort with uncertainty among these young doctors and decided to do a kind of pilot study and try to, on many different levels, help the doctors become more tolerant of uncertainty.

So they added more time for reflection. They added more mentoring, but they also, particularly they, Bethany Picker and others at Maine Medical Center, particularly, explicitly told the young doctors that it was okay not to know. That they didn't have to come up with the answer immediately.

And they tried to make things even more messy for them to actually give them skill in being in the unknown and show them when they came out the other side, relinquishing their fear and discomfort of uncertainty, they could see this as an opportunity. So one young doctor told me, Dr. Nupur Nagrare told me that when life is uncertain, you begin to have less tunnel vision.

And she and others told me that affected their entire lives. And in fact, Dr. Picker told me that this gave them courage. Courage. Courage and uncertainty are not two words that we usually put together, but becoming more tolerant of uncertainty gave them the courage because they were able to, as Kirk pointed out, have this sort of patient space, even in a few minutes, we're not talking about hours, to just understand different ways of seeing the situation.

One of the truisms of uncertainty is that it is a space for possibilities. So I was going to say at the end, the pilot study showed, that for instance, they became, the young doctors became more tolerant of ambiguity. At the beginning, they had rated an expert as someone who always knew the right answer.

By the end, they said that wasn't so true.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, very interesting. So that's then the real sort of transformation of mindset here, that getting more comfortable with uncertainty can bring. Okay. I want to actually just step back for a second here, because that was a really compelling example. But it suddenly occurs to me, when you defined uncertainty at the beginning. We are talking about a kind of uncertainty that doesn't actually threaten survival, because I'm wondering, for families, let's say, who have no idea if they'll be able to make rent next month and may be evicted or a child who is constantly watching their family try to struggle over saving money for food, if they'll be able to eat.

Those are survival and existence-based kinds of uncertainty. Which maybe they teach you resilience in hard times, but I'm not sure it has any positive, overall long-term impact when survival is at stake.

JACKSON: Actually, I think it's complicated. First of all, we never want anyone to be in those sorts of situations.

The bottom line is that we don't, whether it's through socio economic class or mental challenges or et cetera, for people to be in such grave precarity that life is just one big unpredictability. But at the same time, it is far more complicated, and I think in a nutshell, we need to be talking about different types of uncertainty as positive for human flourishing.

So I did some research into this question, of how people thrive and survive in situations of high precarity.

CHAKRABARTI: You focused on kids, right? You learned a lot about kids and precarity.

JACKSON: Exactly. And there's a lot of focus now in the field of developmental psychology and in poverty, unpredictability as a sort of a trans underlying root of some of the ways in which children's minds are shaped cognitively.

So in looking at unpredictability, you find that there are often some downsides, but also some ways in which people raised not just in lower economic circumstances, but also, they might be adopted, or they might have had alcoholism in their household. People actually are able to emerge with incredible survival skills. We might call them street smarts.

They, linking back to that kind of aroused wakefulness that we talked about at the beginning, this is a hyper state where threats have to be seen immediately. And in fact, one Chicago study found that young teen Black boys who were more hyper aroused in this way, as a result of their precarious circumstances, were witnessed less violence over the course of the year.

So that was protective for them to be in this kind of state.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So it was protective and maybe helped them respond appropriately in other in situations.

JACKSON: Absolutely.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but we do have to make it to a break here, Maggie, but I just want to underscore something that you said. That while that might be a resilient silver lining, poverty is pretty well documented as living in a state of constant stress state, right?

And a negative form of uncertainty, which does have a lot of major downsides to cognitive development, as you said, so I didn't want to like, just brush over that too quickly, because that's a major part of people who are struggling to make ends meet, of their lives.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: In between the segments there, you said you wanted to add a little bit more to the question of the differences between precarity. As you call it in the book, and uncertainty, because I was pushing back a little bit about how I find precarity is an overall negative stress experience for people.

JACKSON: Sure, and people can develop important skills, survival skills from existing in precarity, a situation we wouldn't want anyone to face. But at the same time, we also need to understand that a different kind of uncertainty, that skill is related to kind of reflective ability, deliberation, stepping back.

So the scientist Philip David Zelazo has developed a program now that's running in many Head Start centers across the country, that's been highly successful, related to teaching families, helping families learn routines, in which they can also learn moments, instill moments of reflection in a highly precarious day.

While people might be so called in On Point and living in the survival mode, which is very positive in some ways, even though the circumstances not, but they also can, all of us need to learn skills related to stepping back, pausing, reflecting. and deliberating, which is utilizing the suspense of uncertainty for good.

There are different arrows, and there should be and can be different arrows in our quiver related to uncertainty.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Since you mentioned that being as a state of being On Point, I'm going to say to the whole staff here, see, our constant state of uncertainty about whether or not we'll be able to pull off the show is a good thing. (LAUGHS)

Okay. Let's move on to here from a listener again. This is Brenna from Los Angeles, and she told us about a recent experience when she and her husband quit their jobs, sold everything, and took their children to travel around the world for a year.

BRENNA: And the whole entire year was geared to shaking ourselves out of a rut, shaking up the way that we responded to life and making sure that we treasured the moments and the days that we had, which a lot of the reason that we were able to do that was because of the constant uncertainty of our situation.

It took away from that year, a really, a different sort of response and respect for that word. And for the feeling that you get when you're in uncertainty, because inevitably it can mean growth.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Brenna from Los Angeles. Now Maggie, through our listener stories, we've been talking a lot about uncertainty and the individual.

But you also write in the book that welcoming uncertainty has a major benefit for groups, right? And let's talk about in the workplace. I'm a space nerd, so when you wrote about the NASA engineers and the Mars rover, I was like, "Oh, wow." So tell us about why uncertainty works in the workplace with that example.

JACKSON: No, exactly. Uncertainty is not necessarily a solo act. We can be uncertain together and it's actually a very good thing. There's a lot of pressure today to agree with one another. We historically know about group think, but at the same time, we are a family and let's get all on the same page and let's hire for fit, et cetera, et cetera.

A lot of pressures to be in accord. Which is a very particular state of mind related to more lower key neural activity, versus being in disagreement, which is highly related to a much more active, energized state of mind. And at the beginning of the Mars Explorer rover mission, the mission that put the little rover robots on the moon and discovered that the water had flowed there, et cetera.

CHAKRABARTI: Mars.

JACKSON: Sorry. Oh my gosh. Sorry. Sorry. Another story about moon in the book. Mars. Yes, there was a tremendous amount of interest in this team because it was so diverse on so many different levels and so high level, etc. And some scientists spent 400 hours videotaping their conversations.

And what they found was that the conversations in scientists, 20% of the conversations in the early days of the rover mission involved conflict. Now, mild, respectful, frequent, delicious ... judicious conflict. And most of those involved expressions of uncertainty.

And what that does is basically jolt person off the routine, off automaticity, the group off the sort of island, the comfortable, I call it the love seat of accord, where everybody's talking about what they already know, and discussions are shallow, and inaccuracies are not unearthed, etc. etc.

Into the realm of being in disagreement, where people are a little more on their toes and discussions intensifies. Now, why, how does uncertainty play a role? This is really important. We often think of argument, dissent, et cetera, as a situation when someone or people ride in with the right answer, the right side and the argument will win and et cetera.

But that's not actually how the performance gains are accrued when there is good conflict. What happens is that, again, people are a little bit shaken out of their norm. And so they become more questioning and skeptical. So dissenting voice in a group actually, even if wrong, spurs a group to far better performance, better creativity, more intensified examination of the complexity of a situation.

This is true in the Supreme Court, on juries, on climbers, on Mount Everest and in the space program. And so what are you doing there? You're putting people on your toes, but you're also basically unearthing what you don't know. You can't move further if you don't know what you don't know.

That's true in all learning and especially in collaboration, and it was a really exciting time and these, the space, the Mars rover, the MER mission actually made sure that despite their bonding and their camaraderie, they made sure to constantly remind themselves through various practices and rituals, to raise their hand and say, "I don't know." Or, "I disagree."

CHAKRABARTI: I think that is a critical point, right? Because especially in the workplace, that kind of creating space for collaborative conflict, let's call it that, it has to actually be intentionally done, right? A culture in the workplace has to be created in order to welcome that. You can't just rely on people working with each other organically that way, right?

JACKSON: Exactly. We're such social beings. Humans want to be in agreement. Whether we're working for the same team or for the same company. Study after study shows that we fall into homophily, so to speak. And in this situation of agreement, even if you have diverse people at the table, even if you have diverse ideas at the table, the group very highly tends to not even see the differences that are there.

So you're right. It takes work. And one thing the Mars people did was the listening ritual. Every single meeting, every single coming together ended with a call for people to disagree or to say they don't know at the end. And they were really adamant about that, that however, wherever you were on the pecking order of the food chain of the hierarchy, it was your job to actually do that.

And in many organizations, those people are seen as being a pain. Because they make you uncomfortable and groups that are actually in disagreement with uncertainty, in that incredible dynamic of uncertain disagreement, are actually less comfortable and they rate themselves as less effective when they're being far more effective.

So this also gets back to the mindset that we have to change our closed minds about uncertainty. We have to open up and then we'll begin to see these benefits of uncertainty.

CHAKRABARTI: So let's move over to the world of politics. Because here's a place where the truth of uncertainty comes into complete conflict with promises of certainty.

That's how I see how modern politics going. And Larry in Gold Hill, Oregon added to those thoughts. He says that there's a dark and destructive side to uncertainty in American politics. Something that politicians and world leaders, Larry says, use to their advantage.

LARRY: Some of the post-Soviet governments, they maintain a level of uncertainty, just as daily business, there may have been red lines in the good old communist days, but that's nothing compared with the uncertainty that comes with not having the state control most of your life. And to be honest, I would suspect all politicians use uncertainty as a tool.

Some use it in a positive kind of aspirational context, but there's others out there that we see every day using uncertainty as something that's much, much more destructive.

JACKSON: But I would say that I agree and disagree. Because basically what is being used here is our fear of uncertainty. not uncertainty itself.

Again, I have to reiterate, we don't want to live in the extreme, on the far side of the spectrum, or we really don't know what's coming at us. We can't as humans thrive. There's a human right to have some kind of security and predictability, of course. But I think that we would not be unnerved by uncertainty if our human response was more open to it as a truth of life.

I think that basically when we can respond to and open up to and inhabit and harness uncertainty, we can become more open. I think of uncertainty as a form of honesty. So yes, you can do uncertainty, one another, you can spread, just as you can also use certainty as a weapon, smoking isn't bad for you.

We're going to send that message. Any of these sorts of states of mind can be used in weapons as one another. But I do think that a lot of our problem with uncertainty now is fear of, not the condition itself.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. In the last few minutes that we have, Maggie, I want to talk about how to construct spaces in which we can learn to love uncertainty.

And I wanted to close the show this way. Because there was a chapter that you wrote about harnessing the power to daydream in the book. And it reminded me of what Kirk had said earlier. That when he's like dwelling in uncertainty, he actually feels like it's a moment to process things differently and not necessarily hope for a known outcome.

And he called it almost spiritual. And I bring Kirk back into our conversation because, and I'm thinking, not just politics or work, but we're also living in a technological environment, which I would say, I would argue, is geared towards trying to reduce uncertainty down to zero, right? Like they always, tech is always talking about building predictable, predictability algorithms.

They want to send you suggestions that they think you'll already like, so you don't even have to search for anything new, social media feeds, all of that stuff. Where the goal is to put you in a bubble of your knowns. And thinking of kids, this is like the most tender time for brain development for them.

Are we making it harder for kids with technology, and adults even, to learn to love uncertainty and benefit from all the gifts that it can give us?

JACKSON: Yes, I think so. The evidence points that way. And in fact, a very leading researcher on uncertainty and anxiety has studies, early studies, showing that an intolerance of uncertainty, that is, seeing uncertainty as a threat, rather than a challenge is actually, has actually been rising with the penetration of the Internet and smartphones. So there's, and people call, psychologists call the tech devices certainty seeking devices. You put it so well, and also, I would add that just the aesthetics of it, it's boxes, it's bullets, it's this or it's that way, it's multiple choice, et cetera.

Humans don't exist in that. We're losing sight of how we exist. We are gray area species. We're not bullet points. We're not PowerPoints. So I think it's really important. And just a short time online has been shown to give people a kind of hubris. They come away thinking they know more than they do.

And what's important about that is it's really important to know that you don't know, in order to push the envelope of your knowledge, in order to exist on the edge. So I think that, yeah, technology has a great role to play as long as the sort of, as well as a long march of what Dewey called the quest for certainty, the rational idea that defines intelligence very narrowly as achieving one's goals, point blank, which drives AI traditionally.

So I think that technology is a very important vessel of buffering us against the uncertainty that truly exists.

CHAKRABARTI: So I know people are wondering how, what can they do consciously to embrace these positive aspects of uncertainty or build up their tolerance for uncertainty? I don't know how you want to put it, but we've just got about a minute and a half left.

I'd love some advice or pointers from you.

JACKSON: Yes, exactly. A lot of research now is pointing toward bolstering your tolerance for uncertainty. In very small ways. One suggestion, which I initially scoffed at, but I think is wonderful, is just try something new, a new dish in a restaurant. If you are able to just put your toe into the water, so to speak, to go back to the swimming metaphor, of a new experience, you're actually allowing yourself A) to realize that uncertainty isn't disaster, that you can move forward amidst the unknowns.

And then also, it is an area of delight. Trying something new, putting down your phone, which is a package of certainty. And allowing ourselves, it's a very exciting time in brain science vis a vis uncertainty, because we now know how important for human growth is the daydream.

We now know that consciousness works in multiple different ways and is in a kind of wakefulness that we've been discussing. We are beginning to understand that basically, uncertainty unfolds in so many different areas of our life. So I would say, allow kids to daydream, think of it as a sketchbook of the mind, disagree with one another.

Don't stay in that happy place.

CHAKRABARTI: It reminds me of what our listener Awan said about uncertainty keeps the moss from growing on a rolling stone. (LAUGHS)

JACKSON: So true. So true.