Who was I without the violin?Īround that time, I was helping my parents to clear their basement, and I stumbled across a book called The Language Instinct. The doctor told me I could never play again, and at that moment I ended up asking these big existential questions about what it meant to be me. Aged 15, I had a sudden hand injury that derailed my dreams of being a concert violinist. At that point, I was like wow, I’ve got the vote of confidence from my favourite violinist, I have what it takes! And decided to go professional. I was 9 years old when I ended up applying to the Juilliard School of Music in New York and when I was in High School, Itzhak Perlman asked me to be his private violin student. That began a very intense journey for me. Something lit-up in my mind, and I played a couple of notes immediately and requested a pint-sized version of the violin for myself. She’d brought it all the way with her from India when she emigrated to the US in the 1970s, and my mom just brought it down to show me.
: When I was 6 years old, my mom brought down my grandmother’s violin from the attic. Q: How did you go from music to cognitive science? In this interview, I speak to Maya Shankar about her transformation from being a musician to leading the White House Behavioural Science Team, and what she’s learned about change and transformation through her podcast, “ A Slight Change of Plans.” She speaks to Tiffany Haddish on her transformation from foster care kid to Emmy-winning comedian a former member of the extremist Westboro Baptist Church on her experience walking away from a cult Kacey Musgraves on how psychedelics changed her perspective on art a young cancer researcher who gets a diagnosis that changes everything a Black jazz musician who convinced hundreds of KKK members to leave the Klan and Hillary Rodham Clinton who was never willing to change in the way people wanted her to. Today, Maya is Senior Director of Behavioural Economics at Google and is the Creator, Host and Executive Producer of her brilliant new podcast A Slight Change of Plans which explores the question: What exactly happens when we find ourselves on the brink of change? Using her skills as a cognitive scientist, she delves into the incredible stories of a number of guests.
from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford, Shankar served in the Obama White House where she founded the White House Behavioural Science Team, which worked to create better policy using insights from behavioural science. Inspired by her personal story, Shankar has spent the last two decades studying how and why we change. A serious hand injury forced her not only to give up her dream, but to rediscover her identity in the process. When Maya Shankar was 15 years old, her promising career as a concert violinist personally mentored by Itzhak Perlman came to an abrupt end.
0 kommentar(er)
