Seeing Ourselves

Seeing Ourselves

Transcripts for Seeing Ourselves (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

People who aren't NFPs, I just don't even think about them as someone I might marry, because it's just not gonna work.

About a year ago, I was in the UK researching for my honors thesis.

I was connecting with theater companies that use dramatic methods for social justice causes.

I stayed with my most philanthropy-minded friend and her mother for a few days.

When I told her mother what I was studying, she said to me, oh, I didn't think you were into philanthropy.

I felt my face get hot with anger.

I thought, had my friend told her mother that I didn't care about the world?

Did they think I was selfish?

Is this how I was perceived by others as someone who didn't really care about anyone else?

This was bad enough, but it didn't take long for me to turn this into an even more vexing question.

Was I selfish?

Or at least not as philanthropic as I thought I was?

Did I perceive myself inaccurately?

And how could I know one way or the other?

I suddenly saw myself through the lenses of others who judged me.

I started comparing myself to my friend.

Was I somehow not as good as she was because I didn't live and breathe philanthropy?

Did I need to do more things like her, such as start my own nonprofit in order to be truly generous?

In that moment, I realized that even when I begin to question my identity, what I take to be true about myself, the first thing I typically do, which probably most of us do, is look to others.

But I realized that this is not a terrific way of deciding who I am, of seeing myself.

And so, I ran smack into that big, simple question.

How can we know ourselves, reliably, accurately, and without bias?

This is State of the Human, the radio program of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Xandra Clark, your host for this week's show, Seeing Ourselves.

Today, we have stories about the kinds of mirrors we humans have invented to get to know ourselves, from an actual physical mirror to the mirrors created by psychology and genetics.

Each of these mirrors, these ways of seeing ourselves, provides a specialized map of our identities.

In our first story, we'll explore how a different kind of mirror creates a picture of yourself you probably have some difficulty recognizing.

In our second story, we look at another physical representation of ourselves, the human genome, to see what it can and can't tell us about ourselves.

In our third story, we move to a psychological map, the widely used and popular Myers-Briggs personality testing.

And in our final story, we visit with a student who has made a kind of science of seeing herself through the eyes of others.

Stay with us.

Bye Bye.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Xandra Clark, and I'm about to lead you through an exercise.

Think about the last time you looked in a mirror.

Maybe you were brushing your teeth last night or combing your hair this morning.

Really picture yourself.

What do you look like?

Nobody knows this person except you.

That's because the mirror reverses you.

So if you have a birthmark on your right cheek, when you look in the mirror, it'll look like it's on your left cheek.

All of your expressions, your raised eyebrows, your pouts, your smiles, they all read backwards in the mirror.

So this person that you see is actually the opposite of how other people see you.

Of course, you do see yourself as others see you when you look in photographs and in videos.

But what would it be like to actually meet yourself face to face so that you're alive and animate in a way that other people see you?

Turns out this kind of mirror actually exists.

It's known as a true mirror.

And Daniel Steinbock, a graduate student in Stanford School of Education, has one.

I first saw a true mirror at Burning Man.

And I saw some people crowded around a big black box.

And when I wandered over and took a peek, at first I couldn't even look at it.

It was too shocking.

So, Daniel and I take his true mirror to the center of Stanford's campus.

We want to see if others are as shocked by what they see as Daniel was.

He cradles this black box under his arm, and when he opens it, I see that the true mirror is actually made of two mirrors that are perpendicular to each other.

He sits down and turns a knob on the side of the box, calibrating the mirrors until they make a perfect 90 degree corner.

The glass is so thin that when the mirrors touch, it looks just like one mirror.

Their meeting point is totally invisible.

Usually, people in White Plaza are pretty game to be interviewed.

But this time, it's difficult to get volunteers.

Most people we ask refuse to look at their own image.

They say they don't have time, that they're ugly or scared, or in one case, a psych major who's done plenty of these mind experiments before.

Some don't even give any reason at all.

The reality seems to be that looking at yourself in a mirror, whether it's a true mirror or a normal one, is a profoundly personal thing to do.

I guess it's not the kind of thing you want to do in front of strangers.

But some people brave the discomfort and decide to look.

And what they see is nothing out of the ordinary, at least at first.

That's about it.

Doesn't really look that different to me.

Yeah, it does look the same.

I look exactly the same.

I don't find much.

I don't really think that I look really different than what I think that I look like to other people.

Immediately you don't see anything weird.

But if you move, it looks weird.

The differences are subtle, but the more time people spend looking in the mirror, the more they begin to notice the differences.

Asymmetries in their faces, reversed features, the faces they've known their entire lives start to look unfamiliar.

I look asymmetrical.

My hair goes the other way, and it kind of looks different, different aesthetic, and my beard's different.

I think my eyes are closer together too, but that doesn't make sense.

It's a little disorienting.

I mean, I have my part on the other side of my head, and I don't know, I'm just used to it.

Used to it in a specific way.

I feel like my whole face is smaller now.

It's like my hair is the opposite of what I thought it was.

Like the parts on the other side, like when you part your hair, it's weird.

I think I just ripped my hair the other way.

Daniel explains why asymmetries are accentuated in the true mirror.

All physical asymmetries in your face are actually exaggerated for you when you look in the true mirror, because if my nose is two degrees to the left, when I look in the true mirror, because it's mirrored across the center line, it's a four degree difference.

So what this means is, when you have a crooked nose, you're so used to looking at it in the mirror that it becomes normal.

But when you look in the true mirror, it looks doubly wrong, because not only is it not normal, but it's also crooked in the other direction.

For many, recognizing this difference is shocking.

Oh my God.

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

This is trippy.

So, okay, that's so disorienting.

It's really disorienting.

Ooh, that's not what I was expecting.

All right.

It's disconcerting.

Oh yeah, it's true.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

It's weird.

I never seen myself like this before.

What some people see in the mirror isn't themselves.

It's someone else.

I feel like I'm seeing my other, I don't know.

I feel like I'm seeing my other side.

Yeah, like it feels like there's literally another person standing in front of me, as opposed to just me standing in front of a mirror.

At this point, I know that me in a mirror is a reflection of me, but this doesn't look like me in a mirror.

It looks like a twin.

It does look different.

It looks, cause I'm like looking, I'm looking at myself as if I was like standing talking to myself.

This is really weird actually.

Half my face is sadder than the other half.

Yeah.

The external image that you have of yourself gives you a sense of your personality, of who you are inside.

To see your physical appearance flipped is jarring, understandably, and it makes you think about how your interior may also be different than what you'd previously thought.

But while some people see their true mirror reflection as an unfamiliar stranger, others feel like they've finally seen their true self.

And there's a kind of humor in discovering this new person.

Most people laugh, but no one can explain why, whether it's out of discomfort or amusement or something else.

When I finally get the courage to look at myself in the mirror, I say over and over again, my face looks crooked, my hair looks crooked.

I'm laughing, but I also feel kind of weird.

It's hard to describe, but I might have a similar reaction if I suddenly were to see my mom looking 20 years younger than I'm used to seeing her.

It's that bizarre and absurd.

Despite the absurdity, a couple of people go so far as to prefer this new self to the self they've been used to seeing.

Yeah, I look friendlier than in my own mirror.

Yeah, I don't know.

I like this better.

Yeah, I don't know.

I'm not sure what that is.

I look a little better.

I get myself a little less crowd than I should.

Honestly, it was like seeing myself for the first time.

The self that I felt like on the inside.

All my life, I've been looking into a normal mirror, identifying with that person, like, oh, this is the way I look.

Like, oh, I'm pruning myself.

I'm doing my hair.

I'm creating, I'm presenting a particular person.

And then to find out, oh wait, that person actually doesn't even exist.

And that I'm the only one that is familiar with that non-existent person.

Thanks for watching.

For Daniel, this wasn't just an opportunity to see himself for the first time.

Once he had his own true mirror, he began building a relationship with this image.

He started discovering aspects of his personality that he never really understood before.

I found that when I looked into the true mirror, especially when I turned my head to one side so that I was really kind of looking more at one side and then the other, I could really see in myself, actually, different sides of my own personality that I'm aware of.

I could see my own demons and my own angels looking back at me.

And I could sort of almost like facilitate conversations between the different sides of myself.

I found that my right side has a sense of humor and honestly, I never really thought of myself as having a sense of humor.

Even though people had told me that, I looked at this one side and thought, wow, this guy's hilarious.

And every time I look at him, he makes me laugh.

In terms of the model of the personality, it was all kind of Freudian cauldron of all this kind of stuff.

But what Looking in the Mirror did was give a structure to that.

It kind of organized it, made it visible, literally right in front of my face.

I could see those different people that are inside me, so to speak.

And allowed me to look them right in the eye and confront them about their problems or praise them for their strengths.

We use all sorts of complicated mirrors to see ourselves, some of which you'll hear about in this show, like investigating your genes, looking at the stars, and taking personality tests that ask things like, are you more likely to go to a party or stay at home on a Friday night?

But why not start at the simplest level, just physically seeing ourselves as others see us?

Why not first learn as much as we can about our personalities through that new face?

Maybe it's easier to stick with the regular mirrors that we're accustomed to.

Switching to true mirrors might be too disconcerting, as some people said.

Also, there is something kind of nice about having a private image of yourself that no one but you knows.

In a way, that face represents the parts of yourself that other people can't see, and there's no need to throw it away.

But maybe you're up for seeing a new perspective on yourself in the simplest, most basic way.

Through a purely physical lens.

Just be warned that once you look in the true mirror, you might be too intrigued to look away.

The newest mirror for seeing ourselves is the genome, the blueprint of our biological selves.

The first basic map of the human genome was completed just 10 years ago, but already we can get small parts of our own personal genome mapped for just a few hundred dollars to tell us things about ourselves that we likely can't know in any other way.

Storytelling project contributor Raj Bandari spent the last few months exploring this map of human identity to see what it can and can't tell us.

A genome is the complete set of genetic material in a human.

Through most of human history, it's been hidden.

But in today's world, we can now look into ourselves and map our genetic code.

We can now understand ourselves at the basic elemental level.

But we're more than just amino acids and proteins.

This is the story of someone who learned a lot about her genes.

But she found out that knowing about her genetic sequence raised more questions than it answered.

My name is Lone Frank.

I was a neurobiologist.

I'm now a science journalist and have been for 13 years.

A few years ago, Lona began researching what a map of her genome could tell her about herself.

I wanted to tell the story of personal genetics in a personal way.

Before she looked at her genome, Lona had tried another method of learning about herself, a brain scan.

But that didn't tell her what she wanted to know.

I was like asking the guy who did the scan, so is there anything out of the ordinary?

I mean, can you tell me anything about his brain at all?

He was looking at it and said, well, it seems kind of normal.

Well, you got a cute corpus callosum, but you know, that's all I can say.

So brain scans weren't too revealing.

That's when Lona started looking at genetics.

With genetics, you're getting into the basis for who you are.

Lona decided to do what's called a genetic snip test.

Snip, like snip it, not the whole thing.

These tests cost about 200 bucks.

You order one online, the package comes in the mail, you swab the inside of your cheek, send the swab back to the company, and then you wait.

Lona said it didn't feel real at first.

But then when it comes back, and there's this email in your inbox saying, you know, your gene profile is here.

For every disease risk, you're asked, so do you really want this information?

Click yes or no.

Are you sure you want this information?

And then it becomes sort of much more real.

And you start thinking about really, you start thinking about your family history.

Because in the end, I mean, we all have a feeling for where the red flags in our genomes will be.

Lona was finding out what diseases she had a higher than normal risk for.

But in some sense, she already knew what these were.

I was concerned about, you know, heart disease.

And I was concerned about, you know, several cancers that have been in my family.

I actually got halfway drunk on beer when I was sitting there and waiting to sort of look into this genome.

Lona had before her some potentially scary information.

It was like seeing a fortune teller who could only tell her bad news.

How likely was she to get Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease?

Lona could find out, but each disease required a separate decision, a separate click.

I'm the kind of person who just can't say no to information about myself in a way.

So I went through all of them.

Lona checked the ones that didn't scare her first, like gout.

And then she had to confront diseases she had a very real possibility of encountering, diseases she was genuinely worried about.

You know, Alzheimer's was the last one I did because you can actually, in this test, you can get the knowledge that you have like 50% risk of Alzheimer's.

And that one was really sort of, oh God, I was thinking about that.

Oh, should I do this?

And I've been hearing the stories about Steven Pinker, for example, who doesn't want to look into his Alzheimer's status.

But I thought to myself, well, Steven Pinker is a pussy, I'll do this.

So I did.

And it turned out well.

At this point, Lona knew a lot about her genome.

At the same time, she didn't know very much.

She knew the sequence of about a million pairs of amino acids that made up her genome.

That might sound like a lot, but it's really only a small fraction of all there is to know.

And more annoying for Lona, it didn't shed light on her psychology.

It told her what diseases she might get, but it didn't tell her much about her mind, herself.

And that was something Lona was very curious about.

I have a family history, a sort of heavy family history of depression and mental illness.

I mean, I have suffered from depression, several bouts that have needed treatment.

And my mother had really heavy depressions.

Her mother was hospitalized for years with depressions.

In my father's family, there are several people who have killed themselves over depressions.

So I wanted to look into that.

Using genetics to predict illnesses of the body is pretty new territory.

And geneticists who do it can speak only in probabilities.

But the genetics of personality, that's an even wilder frontier.

Still, Lona was curious, and she found researchers in Copenhagen who would look at her genetic sequence and use that information to tell her about her personality and her risk of certain mental illnesses.

But before the researchers can even look at her genome, Lona had to take a personality test.

I remember walking into the room where the psychologist who had, you know, looked at my test was sitting.

And he said, so you're Lona?

Yeah, I said hi.

And he said, well, you know, yesterday when I was looking into this, I was just not looking forward to meeting you at all.

I thought, well, what is in that test?

The test is a personality test called the five factor model.

The five factor model is based off the work of a psychologist named JM.

Digman from the early 1990s.

He used it to understand the academic behaviors of people.

It sums up a person's personality in terms of five characteristics.

Agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.

It's pretty easy to guess which factors you want to score high on and which you'd rather flunk.

I have the inkling that I'm probably a bit neurotic.

And that's what the test showed.

But also, I just scored rock bottom on agreeableness.

And as he said, I have never seen that in a woman before.

So that was an eye-opener.

The science of personality genetics is so new that it's hard to tell what different genes mean.

Scientists know certain patterns correlate with certain outcomes.

But they don't know much for sure.

Lona's genes would contribute to a general understanding of how genes affected personality.

But she was also getting some pretty intense personal information, the kind with the power to transform the way she thought about herself.

I knew, of course, that I am a depressive person.

I've had several episodes of depression, but I wasn't really prepared for my genetic analysis showing that of all the genes that they tested, I am homozygous for all the sensitive variants, and in a double dose even.

Homozygous for all the sensitive variants.

Sounds complex, but let's take it apart.

Homozygous.

Genes come from your mom and your dad.

Well, homozygous means for any particular gene, say depression, you got the same gene from your mom and your dad.

And the sensitive variants, that's just scientific talk for genes that seem to matter.

So I remember sitting there with the study leader, the PI, and she was telling me all this, and she was completely poker-faced, and I was like, but this is like a total, you know, I just lost the genetic lottery here.

It sounded rough.

From her family history, Lona already knew that she had some bad luck, genetically.

But the test confirmed how bad it was.

On the other hand, all those supposedly bad traits she just found out that she had, well, one researcher gave Lona another way to think about them.

Because probably it has some evolutionary benefit.

What's the benefit of anxiety, depression, stress?

Well, for one, you're more thoughtful.

You notice details better.

These are good qualities.

There's a reason they survived in people, a reason they survived in Lona's ancestors.

Far from condemning her to a life of depression, Lona's genetic test showed her something kind of inspiring.

She now knew for certain that she was part of a long line of warriors, hand-wringing, nail-biting, but reproductively successful warriors.

Lone Frank's book, My Beautiful Genome, recently won the Danish Author Society's Prize for Best Nonfiction.

Her blog can be found at lonafrank.dk.

Okay.

Sometimes, our genes tell us about more than ourselves.

Sometimes, they tell us about people who have the same genes.

I'm talking about our families.

If genome sequencing is a mirror, then when you hold it up, it's like seeing everyone you descended from, and everyone who descended from them, behind you.

So, my name is Colleen Caleshu.

I am a genetic counselor in the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease.

Colleen is a genetic counselor.

She helps families deal with information received from one family member's genetic test.

In this case, the initial person to get the test done is someone who has experienced some type of heart condition.

Something happens so their heart doesn't work properly.

Sometimes it even leads to sudden death.

When this happens, Colleen might be able to tell the rest of the family whether that might happen to them.

These genetic tests don't tell you a lot about yourself, usually just one thing, but it's a big thing, and it may be something that's true for others in your family.

A lot of the time I spend talking with individuals and families with hereditary heart conditions is about what one person in the family having the hereditary heart condition means for the rest of the family.

When Colleen meets with the family to tell them whether an affliction is genetically related, the people in the room are hoping for different answers.

The person who already had the heart attack or some other episode might hope it's genetically related.

That way they might be able to do a better job of treating it.

Also, they may have just saved their family members from not knowing at all.

The family members, though, well, this is the first time they are getting information about this.

I have to bring back a woman and her brother who both have heart problems.

He actually survived a heart attack.

She has very active heart problems and is sick and was in the hospital and was in heart failure.

And we've now found this genetic difference in her that I'm pretty sure is the cause of what they both have.

And it means that the people in their family who they right now think of as healthy could actually be walking around at risk to have an arrest like he did and maybe not survive like he did.

It gets even more kind of personal for the individuals who need to have a conversation about what this means for planning a family and the choices they're going to make for having children, which for many people, this doesn't factor in to those choices at all, but for some people it really does, and they want to know what their options are for building a family and not passing on the heart condition.

Families really depend on Colleen.

They make huge life decisions based on what she tells them.

But the weird thing is, and this is true for all genetic scientists, is she doesn't know for sure.

She has a lot of good information to help her figure out what's going on, but her information still doesn't add up to certainty.

So the question is how much benefit does that provide?

Hopefully for those people, in a portion of those cases, we'll be able to find an answer.

In a lot of those cases, we won't be able to find an answer, and that's because there's tons of variation in all of our genomes, and we are far more ignorant than we'd like to be about what that variation does and doesn't do to our bodies and our health.

Scientists have a base of genomes they use to make predictions, but that base is still quite small.

In fact, for a long time, that baseline was just one person's genome.

The only way to give families more answers is to get more full genome maps.

The good news is we're on our way.

Next up, we'll hear about one person who added his genetic map to the growing pool of knowledge.

Colleen works at the Stanford Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease.

More about the center can be found at familyheart.stanford.edu.

Of the more than 6 billion people on earth, only a handful have had their full genome sequenced.

These people, when they make their genomes public, become the base for our understanding of what a genome should look like.

Steve Quake, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford, is one of those people.

It's individuals like Steve who are helping Colleen do the work she does.

When Steve made his decision to sequence himself, a lot of people at Stanford got involved, including Hank Greely, who I met with at the Stanford Law School in January.

My name's Hank Greely.

I'm a law professor at Stanford where I direct the Center for Law and the Biosciences.

I wasn't directly involved with Steve's decision to sequence himself.

He did that on his own.

He makes sequencing machines and he decided to be his own test sample.

Steve and his colleagues published two papers.

The first was specific to Steve's genome, the process of mapping it, how hard it was to analyze, what was learned.

The other was not just about Steve, but about all of us.

The second paper was really more on what the consequences of whole genome sequencing will be for clinical medicine and the things we need to worry about.

As the price of sequencing comes down lower and lower, the potential applications of the technology get a lot bigger and that makes for lots of interesting problems.

If you could sequence a whole genome but it costs $500 million, that's going to have limited real world applications.

If the technology allows you to sequence a whole genome for $500, that's going to change the world.

Well, I think that with a $500 genome, almost everybody who's got good health coverage will have their genes, their genome sequenced.

I think babies will be sequenced at birth.

I also think there'll probably be more use of prenatal genetic testing to test fetuses or even embryos before implantation.

I had to pause here.

What Hank was describing sounded like a world where cheap genetic testing means our genes determine whether or not we'll be born.

Was this knowledge going to change the entire way humanity existed?

Greely's answer surprised me.

I think one of the things that will then happen is people will be surprised at how little useful information they get from genetic testing.

Because most of us are unlikely to carry anything that is enormously powerful, at least in our own lives.

But there will be enough useful information, I think, to make it worthwhile, like $500 a genome, to do everybody's.

This made me think.

The day of everybody getting their genome sequenced is coming, Lona's test to find out more about herself, what Colleen does.

Well, it's all gonna get more sophisticated.

The mirror is gonna get better in my lifetime, and soon we'll all see ourselves in this new and different light.

And this seems scary.

So I asked Hank, was he scared?

Actually, I don't lose sleep over this.

I think it will be a big change, but I look at the big changes that societies have gone through in the last couple hundred years and are continuing to go through today.

I think we'll muddle through.

We won't do it perfectly.

There will be some people harmed as a result.

That's true with every new technology.

I do think the area that will probably have the most, raise the most controversy isn't so much the privacy issue or the discrimination issues.

It will be questions of childbirth and picking genes.

To what extent will we allow parents to do that?

To what extent around the world will governments try to get involved in doing that?

That I think will be the biggest controversy.

I'm pretty confident, though, that on the other end of it, we'll still end up with a human species that isn't all that much different from ourselves, for better or for worse.

The Stanford Storytelling Project and State of the Human would like to thank Lone Frank, Colleen Caleshu and Hank Greely for their time and sharing of their stories and expertise.

Raj Bandari is a graduate student in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford.

Thank you.

While the newest way to see ourselves more deeply is through the genome, the most dominant way to see ourselves today is through psychology, whether it be through formal psychoanalysis, self-help books, or the personality testing that has become commonplace in schools and businesses.

The mirrors that psychology has created are powerful because they can identify hidden or underappreciated aspects of ourselves.

Personality tests, like the five-factor model discussed in our last story, might not reveal what serious therapy might, but they have become a way for many people to uncover those hidden aspects.

Producer Rachel Hamburg introduces us to a recent Stanford graduate who has a special relationship with one of these tests.

I think I was directed to Myers-Briggs when I was 13 or 14 years old.

This is John Nantz.

He graduated in 2010.

He says Myers-Briggs has basically infused his whole adult life.

He grew up in Kansas City and he says it all started when he was helping out his high school figure out how to run its open house day for admissions.

And for some reason, I took a very highly structured, efficiency focused view on how to run things.

And anyways, there was a priest there, a Jesuit guy, who was kind of a glad hander.

And he, you know, I guess had a history of sort of trying to like personally introduce himself to every single family that came in for this open house.

Now we had about 500 families coming through and I decided to go ahead and take matters into my own hands when a line started to build.

And so I basically just bypassed this guy who was introducing himself to families.

I would just sort of pull families out of the line, go right around them and then give them to some other tour guide to start the tour.

In my mind, this was completely ridiculous waiting to meet this guy who they probably didn't care about, but this guy like was really pissed off.

And so he's actually like quite bitter about the whole experience and it was not a big fan of me.

I just feel like at 14 years old, it didn't make sense because I was like, well, you know, here I am doing a great job as far as I can define it.

And you know, this seems to be objectively obvious that this is the right thing.

Like, why am I getting in trouble for this?

And so I talked to my aunt and she was like, well, you know, you need to get to a better understanding of how you look at the world and how other people look at the world.

She said, look, you know, read, please understand me too.

It's sort of the seminal work in the field and you can, you know, try to figure this out.

And so she actually went and bought me this book.

So I ended up reading the whole thing and absolutely loving it.

Okay, we have to take a break here to explain some things because John's about to rattle off a whole bunch of letters and it's gonna be really overwhelming if you don't know what he means.

So it's gonna take about three minutes but it'll make everything way better if you understand.

Ready?

So let's start with the book.

Please Understand Me Too, To the Number, Not the Word, is a bestseller from 1978.

It's based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is a personality test that asks about 60 or 70 true or false questions to create a portrait of you based on where you fall in four different categories.

For each category you get a letter.

It gets a little more involved here, so stay focused.

The first category is Introversion vs.

Extraversion.

If you're an extrovert, you get energy from talking to people, from being the center of attention.

If that's you, give yourself an E.

If you'd rather stay home and read a book, you're an introvert, an I.

Next is whether you tend to pay attention to what's immediately around you or if you get kind of abstract.

If you enter a room and immediately notice the psychedelic cat painting, then you're an S.

That means sense-based.

If you think, what does it mean to be inside?

Well, then you're an N.

That stands for intuitive.

So we've got extroverted or introverted, sense-based or intuitive.

The next category is how you decide.

If you tend to use your emotions to make decisions, you're an F.

Stands for feeling.

If you're more of a rational, Spock type, well, then you're a T.

That's thinking.

The last category asks how you live your life.

If you live an ordered, routine-based life, pack your lunch at 9 a.m., catch the 922 bus, read the same paper every day, you get a J for judging.

If you're more open, spontaneous, miss your alarms, get breakfast, run to work in your PJs, that makes you a P for perceiving.

The terms can be complicated because they don't really mean what they mean in normal English.

Okay, pop quiz, E-N-F-P.

Now take a second.

E, that's extroversion, life of the party.

N, remember N, that's intuition.

You have abstract thoughts like, who am I?

F, feeling, as opposed to thinking.

Last is P, perceiving, you're open, spontaneous.

Congratulations, next time you cut your own hair, use a mirror.

So back to the story.

Fourteen-year-old John has just pissed off a Jesuit priest.

John thinks the priest is being dumb, but then he takes the Myers-Briggs test, and he realizes something.

It's not about dumb or not dumb, the right way or the wrong way.

It's just different types of personalities.

I happen to be an INTJ, which is like a really strong personality type.

Pretty introverted, highly abstract, highly thought-based, and pretty judgmental as well.

So anyways, I read the book, and it was really easy to see, okay, well, he's an ESTJ, I'm INTJ, he values spontaneity and his ability to connect and all this other foo-foo stuff.

And I, of course, just want to get people through the line.

So that was kind of just the starting story.

And I think the personality type thing has kind of run its way through my entire life, to be honest, in terms of who I like, who I relate to in different ways.

My mother is ENFP, my brother is ENFP, my best friend is ENFP, and one of my favorite girlfriends is ENFP.

And then I've also dated two INFPs and an INFJ.

It's funny because in terms of explaining something that seems extremely complex and very personal, who you fall in love with and who do you spend time with, it's proven to me to be a very effective indicator of a relationship that will work.

I have to date an inn, because I just don't find anybody else interesting.

And I have enough tea for a thousand people, so I don't need someone else to help me think through the world.

So the ask just intrigues me, like it's just interesting to have someone think about the world, you know, what feelings you have about things, like the human story.

Then I was like, okay, there's very little doubt in my mind that I'll end up marrying an NFP, which I actually think is true.

Which is kind of crazy, I guess, like that's a pretty specific, that's a pretty important decision and to be like pretty clear that, in fact, I'd almost say that I don't even consider people who aren't NFPs.

I just don't even think about them as someone I might marry because it's just not gonna work.

To be completely honest with you, I just know, I mean, I know is a strong word.

I have very strong hypotheses about what people are.

I mean, being a 25-year-old and having seen that probably about 500 people with this notion somewhere in the back of my head, you just figure it out.

Some people are pretty archetypal, right?

Like you just meet them and you're like, whoa, you came in the door smiling, and you have a lot of energy, and in your first 10 minutes, you talk about things that are pretty within the context of where we are, right?

Like, wow, this room is really hot, lunch was really great, right?

Very sense-based stuff, and then they place a judgment on it, right?

Like, oh, that was too hot, and then they're talking a lot.

Okay, ESTJ.

Okay.

If I listen to myself, I could tell you within two minutes that I'm an INTJ.

Just by the way I talk about things.

I haven't talked about my feelings, right?

I haven't talked about that made me feel sad, that made me feel enlightened or nothing, right?

It's just pure raw thinking.

But I always think, at some level, I wanted to kind of be an ST Because I think, at some level, an INTJ personality type, it's tough.

I think, especially for younger people, until you're almost 25, it's kind of a crappy personality type.

Yeah, it's not the one you'd pick to be 18 years old.

It's really thoughtful, right?

INTJs will sort of watch a room and read a book and walk around and think about things for no reason, but other than the fact that they find joy in it, which sounds great in intellectual circles, but as a 19 year old, you just feel like a tool.

You're like, why am I doing this?

I used to be out there meeting girls, doing stupid, being a 19 year old, which in our society, I think the typical 19 year old is an ESTJ.

You're loud, you're gregarious, you're flowing, you're drinking beer, you're playing sports, you like football, you're hustling and bustling, you're Mr.

Bubbly, you're living life, you're loving life, you're not worrying too much about consequences, you're just letting it flow.

And you're a 19 years old and life's baller, right?

So I love the EST, bon-de-bon attitude, but it never came to me naturally.

And then I think a year or two ago, when I was traveling, I took like eight months off and I was traveling, I think I just really realized how beautiful my view in the world is.

Thank you for.

Who the hell can take a train ride, you know, in India, for two days, and sit in a beach hut by himself for two or three days, and then meet a guy, have a really great conversation for four hours on some analytical topic, and then go back to himself for two or three days, and absolutely love.

It.

I think the last year or two, I've really fallen in love with my personality type.

I really think that's true.

I'm smiling right now, because I'm just like, well, that's actually really true I have.

Which I think is good, because it's who you are, right?

I think it's important to get to know yourself, and I think if you can get past getting to know yourself, and get to the point where you fall in love with yourself, and you're like, I don't feel like I'm better than anybody, but I love the cards that I've been dealt.

John Nantz completed his master's degree in management science and engineering at Stanford in 2010.

The true mirror, the genome, the Myers-Briggs test, each of these are powerful mirrors, but they don't hold a candle to the mirror we use most, the people around us.

In our final story today, producer Christy Hartman introduces us to Iris Clayter.

Social situations can be awkward.

You're at a party, and let's be honest, you want to say the right thing.

You want people to laugh if you're trying to be funny.

You want them to listen, really listen, if you have something to say.

It can be a little intense.

Your new Casanovas' eyes shift away from yours as you're explaining that dream you had, the one where you're at a bar, and the beer labels have been replaced with recipes for barbecue sauce.

And you notice they're not paying attention.

You follow their gaze and see they're staring at a bunch of good-looking people, standing together, laughing.

It's hard, looking in a stranger's face for validation.

You might, on a bad night, be left wondering, what's the point?

Why do I care so much what people think?

Like it or not, we see ourselves how other people see us.

So if your former Casanova thinks you're boring, you must be boring.

If he thinks you're funny, you must be funny.

We all do this.

We look to others for proof that we have value, and we keep track in our heads of when we get that validation.

Some of us do it more, some less.

Iris is a Stanford student who does it more than most of us, probably.

But she's on to something, I think.

My name is Iris Clayter.

There were two weeks during the summer between seventh grade and eighth grade when I went away to a family ranch camp with a friend.

And then the following week, I went to summer camp.

Before then, I had had a few minor crushes, but those two weeks, there were two different people, two different guys, where it was my first real infatuation with a boy.

And it started not because I was randomly interested out of the blue, but because of some attention that I got first.

So the first camp was, I think they may have had some horses and stuff at the ranch, but we didn't.

I was never into horses.

But they had a pool, we'd hang out by the pool.

There was like, it was really hot.

And everything was pretty much, was in pretty close quarters.

At that point, I had stopped taking piano lessons, but I was still kind of into piano and I would just play like pop songs on the piano that they had inside the ranch house.

And there was this one guy who like sort of came and watched me play for a little while.

And then I came back later and he was playing and he was playing like really cool like jazz piano, just like improvising, and I thought that was so cool.

Later, we were, me and my friends were hanging out in the guest, like the ranch house or whatever, and he was there with his family, and there was like one of those sort of like cheesy hoedown type theme parties, and every single time I would look over across the room at his family and him, he would be looking at me.

It struck me as like, oh, you know, he notices me, like he's paying attention to me.

So that was the first time I'd ever had any sort of interaction with a guy where I wasn't, where, I guess where it wasn't playful, it wasn't malicious, it was, it was like, oh, you appreciate my presence.

So, I left for camp, like, pretty much the day after I got back from the family camp.

And there were these two brothers who'd come from Humboldt, and they, both of them had the long sort of like surfer haircut that's like sort of in your face, you know, like overgrown type thing.

They were real basketball players.

They were super tall.

They were like 6'4.

And the older one, Sam, would, I would, it was the same thing.

We'd be, you know, I'd be at campfire, and I'd look over, and he'd be like staring deadpan, like looking me in the eye.

He, that was, again, like one of the first times I'd ever talked to a guy who wasn't a total head.

Like, he would look you in the eye and say, Hi, my name is Sam.

It's nice to meet you.

And he would ask you questions.

Like, he would ask you, where are you from?

He took, like, just the slightest interest in me.

Again, it was one of those things where, like, nothing really happened.

It was just every exchange that we had was, like, very positive and left me feeling, like, oh, wow, that was really nice.

Like, I feel good about myself.

I feel like I did something right, you know?

I proved myself in some way that I hadn't really done before.

It absolutely has stuck with me.

Like, I think that in every interaction I have with guys, I want them to walk away from whatever, like, brief interaction, like, oh, well, I want to spend more time with her.

When I started to pay more attention to guys and started to pay more attention to the attention that they gave me, more importantly, I would sort of view, like, everything.

It was almost like a game where you could put a point value on everything that a guy did, right?

If a guy, if you made eye contact, that was, like, one point.

If you had, if you were standing in a circle of people and their body was, and feet were pointed directly at me, that was, like, two points.

If they went out of their way to say, Iris, like, what do you think about this?

Three points.

If they said, Iris, like, I really like your smile or, like, something, four points.

Everything was sort of part of this, like, game, and you wanted to sort of climb up the levels.

You know, there's something fundamentally good if someone's telling you you're worth...

By just making eye contact, they're telling you you're worth looking at.

By introducing themselves, they're telling you you're worth knowing.

Like, there's no other way to really think that you're worth looking at or worth knowing or worth unless someone else gives you those indications.

We grow up with all kinds of cliches about valuing ourselves, about not looking at others to feel good.

But what if everything we've been told is wrong?

What if we can never know ourselves?

If we're funny or smart or worth talking to, what if it doesn't matter how we feel about ourselves?

French philosopher Jacques Derrida thought this was true.

He thought only other people see your secret self and that we can never see ourselves because ourselves get in the way.

Like trying to taste your own tongue or smell your own house.

We can learn about ourselves only by what people show us.

Iris realized this and she made a tool for measuring herself.

I conditioned myself to think two things.

First of all, to never expect that people think highly of you.

To never expect that people think that you're any better than you are.

You have to prove that yourself.

Like if someone invites me to go out, for example, I will almost always say yes.

If I think there's a chance that when I go out, the game will be there, and I'll be, like, racking at points and going through the motions and the levels, I'll usually go if I have the energy.

Why do you think you need the validation from other people?

Well, it doesn't count if you just say it's from yourself.

It's just a lie.

You need other people to validate certain things, to make them real and to make them, like, actual achievements.

There is one obvious way to get validation from other people.

Be more like them.

Be a social chameleon.

Learn to connect with all kinds of people.

Learn to make them think you're one of them.

Just like a real chameleon, Iris can change her appearance to better fit in.

I guess it kind of is reflected in the way I dress.

I don't dress very preppy.

I don't dress very stylish.

It's just sort of like the middle ground.

And it makes it really easy to adapt.

I think that if you're careful and have enough awareness of the people around you, I think it's really easy to pick up on these things and to just feed people not exactly what they want to hear, but the version of you that's best suited to their taste.

There's no reason you can't be friends or can't be liked by pretty much anyone in the world.

But what is a chameleon's true color?

And let's stop talking about chameleons for a second.

What about Iris?

When she outgrows points, when she outgrows fitting in, who will she be?

Who's the real Iris?

Well, it's not like, this is a completely different Iris.

I would say that if you did have to isolate it to like, what is the real version of me?

It's like the version of me that's with my family.

Like with my family, I'm much more like, you know, dress up in costumes, cook huge dinners, put on like Christmas shows.

And I like to like do things and I'm the one who like starts things and gets things going.

Long term, when I stop being this person who seeks attention and like the adrenaline rush that I get from guys, I think that I will hopefully ultimately find someone with whom I act in a similar way that I do around my family.

That would be like ideal I think.

Iris Clayter is a junior at Stanford.

Thanks for joining us today on State of the Human.

Today's program was produced by myself, Raj Bandari, Rachel Hamburg, Christy Hartman, Charlie Mintz and Jonah Willihnganz.

Thanks to our contributors today, Daniel Steinbock, Lone Frank, Hank Greely, Colleen Caleshu, John Nantz and Iris Clayter.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, the Center for Teaching and Learning and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every fabulous episode of State of the Human on Stanford iTunes and on our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Tune in next week when we'll hear stories about giving.

You just won't believe how hard it is to do.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Xandra Clark.