0:00:00.419,0:00:02.765
One day in 1819,

0:00:02.765,0:00:05.524
3,000 miles off the coast of Chile,

0:00:05.524,0:00:08.454
in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean,

0:00:08.454,0:00:12.494
20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater.

0:00:12.494,0:00:14.674
They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped

0:00:14.674,0:00:17.575
a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull.

0:00:17.575,0:00:19.904
As their ship began to sink beneath the swells,

0:00:19.904,0:00:24.217
the men huddled together in three small whaleboats.

0:00:24.217,0:00:26.480
These men were 10,000 miles from home,

0:00:26.480,0:00:29.703
more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land.

0:00:29.703,0:00:31.907
In their small boats, they carried only

0:00:31.907,0:00:33.473
rudimentary navigational equipment

0:00:33.473,0:00:37.121
and limited supplies of food and water.

0:00:37.121,0:00:39.325
These were the men of the whaleship Essex,

0:00:39.325,0:00:41.980
whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick."

0:00:41.980,0:00:44.929
Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire,

0:00:44.929,0:00:46.855
but think about how much worse it would have been then.

0:00:46.855,0:00:50.080
No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong.

0:00:50.080,0:00:52.992
No search party was coming to look for these men.

0:00:52.992,0:00:55.854
So most of us have never experienced a situation

0:00:55.854,0:00:59.357
as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves,

0:00:59.357,0:01:01.224
but we all know what it's like to be afraid.

0:01:01.224,0:01:03.518
We know how fear feels,

0:01:03.518,0:01:05.622
but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about

0:01:05.622,0:01:07.267
what our fears mean.

0:01:07.267,0:01:10.104
As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear

0:01:10.104,0:01:13.017
as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard

0:01:13.017,0:01:15.835
like baby teeth or roller skates.

0:01:15.835,0:01:18.330
And I think it's no accident that we think this way.

0:01:18.330,0:01:20.937
Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings

0:01:20.937,0:01:23.676
are hard-wired to be optimists.

0:01:23.676,0:01:26.459
So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes,

0:01:26.459,0:01:28.437
as a danger in and of itself.

0:01:28.437,0:01:31.434
"Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic."

0:01:31.434,0:01:34.083
In English, fear is something we conquer.

0:01:34.083,0:01:37.916
It's something we fight. It's something we overcome.

0:01:37.916,0:01:40.121
But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way?

0:01:40.121,0:01:44.264
What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination,

0:01:44.264,0:01:46.642
something that can be as profound and insightful

0:01:46.642,0:01:49.296
as storytelling itself?

0:01:49.296,0:01:51.889
It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination

0:01:51.889,0:01:55.168
in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid.

0:01:55.168,0:01:57.449
When I was a child, I lived in California,

0:01:57.449,0:02:00.138
which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live,

0:02:00.138,0:02:04.146
but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary.

0:02:04.146,0:02:07.187
I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier

0:02:07.187,0:02:09.620
that hung above our dining table swing back and forth

0:02:09.620,0:02:11.795
during every minor earthquake,

0:02:11.795,0:02:14.098
and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified

0:02:14.098,0:02:16.619
that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping.

0:02:16.619,0:02:19.491
And what we say about kids who have fears like that

0:02:19.491,0:02:22.719
is that they have a vivid imagination.

0:02:22.719,0:02:25.109
But at a certain point, most of us learn

0:02:25.109,0:02:27.995
to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up.

0:02:27.995,0:02:30.752
We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed,

0:02:30.752,0:02:33.732
and not every earthquake brings buildings down.

0:02:33.732,0:02:37.140
But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds

0:02:37.140,0:02:40.251
fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults.

0:02:40.251,0:02:44.112
The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species,"

0:02:44.112,0:02:46.969
"Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past,"

0:02:46.969,0:02:50.308
also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives

0:02:50.308,0:02:54.764
of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust.

0:02:54.764,0:02:57.693
So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear

0:02:57.693,0:03:00.997
from visionaries and young children?

0:03:00.997,0:03:03.857
Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment,

0:03:03.857,0:03:07.544
to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex.

0:03:07.544,0:03:09.663
Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations

0:03:09.663,0:03:13.419
were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific.

0:03:13.419,0:03:16.968
Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship.

0:03:16.968,0:03:19.671
The time had come for the men to make a plan,

0:03:19.671,0:03:22.397
but they had very few options.

0:03:22.397,0:03:24.828
In his fascinating account of the disaster,

0:03:24.828,0:03:27.568
Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about

0:03:27.568,0:03:31.968
as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth.

0:03:31.968,0:03:34.268
The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach

0:03:34.268,0:03:38.044
were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away.

0:03:38.044,0:03:40.566
But they'd heard some frightening rumors.

0:03:40.566,0:03:42.244
They'd been told that these islands,

0:03:42.244,0:03:46.488
and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals.

0:03:46.488,0:03:48.864
So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered

0:03:48.864,0:03:50.505
and eaten for dinner.

0:03:50.505,0:03:53.257
Another possible destination was Hawaii,

0:03:53.257,0:03:55.129
but given the season, the captain was afraid

0:03:55.129,0:03:58.350
they'd be struck by severe storms.

0:03:58.350,0:04:02.142
Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult:

0:04:02.142,0:04:05.766
to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching

0:04:05.766,0:04:07.655
a certain band of winds that could eventually

0:04:07.655,0:04:09.919
push them toward the coast of South America.

0:04:09.919,0:04:12.640
But they knew that the sheer length of this journey

0:04:12.640,0:04:16.151
would stretch their supplies of food and water.

0:04:16.151,0:04:19.557
To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms,

0:04:19.557,0:04:22.918
to starve to death before reaching land.

0:04:22.918,0:04:26.310
These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men,

0:04:26.310,0:04:29.209
and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to

0:04:29.209,0:04:31.863
would govern whether they lived or died.

0:04:31.863,0:04:36.073
Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name.

0:04:36.073,0:04:38.351
What if instead of calling them fears,

0:04:38.351,0:04:39.962
we called them stories?

0:04:39.962,0:04:42.195
Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it.

0:04:42.195,0:04:45.255
It's a kind of unintentional storytelling

0:04:45.255,0:04:48.185
that we are all born knowing how to do.

0:04:48.185,0:04:50.948
And fears and storytelling have the same components.

0:04:50.948,0:04:52.813
They have the same architecture.

0:04:52.813,0:04:55.490
Like all stories, fears have characters.

0:04:55.490,0:04:57.913
In our fears, the characters are us.

0:04:57.913,0:05:02.215
Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends.

0:05:02.215,0:05:06.331
You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails.

0:05:06.331,0:05:08.899
Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be

0:05:08.899,0:05:12.248
every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel.

0:05:12.248,0:05:15.204
Picture a cannibal, human teeth

0:05:15.204,0:05:17.411
sinking into human skin,

0:05:17.411,0:05:20.465
human flesh roasting over a fire.

0:05:20.465,0:05:23.201
Fears also have suspense.

0:05:23.201,0:05:25.491
If I've done my job as a storyteller today,

0:05:25.491,0:05:26.999
you should be wondering what happened

0:05:26.999,0:05:29.100
to the men of the whaleship Essex.

0:05:29.100,0:05:33.345
Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense.

0:05:33.345,0:05:36.898
Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention

0:05:36.898,0:05:40.837
on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature:

0:05:40.837,0:05:43.594
What will happen next?

0:05:43.594,0:05:46.298
In other words, our fears make us think about the future.

0:05:46.298,0:05:48.316
And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable

0:05:48.316,0:05:49.986
of thinking about the future in this way,

0:05:49.986,0:05:52.877
of projecting ourselves forward in time,

0:05:52.877,0:05:55.289
and this mental time travel is just one more thing

0:05:55.289,0:05:58.911
that fears have in common with storytelling.

0:05:58.911,0:06:01.404
As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction

0:06:01.404,0:06:03.287
is learning to predict how one event in a story

0:06:03.287,0:06:05.031
will affect all the other events,

0:06:05.031,0:06:07.080
and fear works in that same way.

0:06:07.080,0:06:12.257
In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another.

0:06:12.257,0:06:14.903
When I was writing my first novel, "The Age Of Miracles,"

0:06:14.903,0:06:17.864
I spent months trying to figure out what would happen

0:06:17.864,0:06:21.053
if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down.

0:06:21.053,0:06:23.945
What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops?

0:06:23.945,0:06:25.988
What would happen to our minds?

0:06:25.988,0:06:29.094
And then it was only later that I realized how very similar

0:06:29.094,0:06:31.215
these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself

0:06:31.215,0:06:33.452
as a child frightened in the night.

0:06:33.452,0:06:35.983
If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry,

0:06:35.983,0:06:39.849
what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family?

0:06:39.849,0:06:44.549
And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story.

0:06:44.549,0:06:47.052
So if we think of our fears as more than just fears

0:06:47.052,0:06:49.979
but as stories, we should think of ourselves

0:06:49.979,0:06:52.210
as the authors of those stories.

0:06:52.210,0:06:54.172
But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves

0:06:54.172,0:06:56.676
as the readers of our fears, and how we choose

0:06:56.676,0:07:01.011
to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.

0:07:01.011,0:07:04.012
Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others.

0:07:04.012,0:07:06.933
I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs,

0:07:06.933,0:07:09.559
and the author found that these people shared a habit

0:07:09.559,0:07:12.918
that he called "productive paranoia," which meant that

0:07:12.918,0:07:15.439
these people, instead of dismissing their fears,

0:07:15.439,0:07:18.102
these people read them closely, they studied them,

0:07:18.102,0:07:21.702
and then they translated that fear into preparation and action.

0:07:21.702,0:07:23.619
So that way, if their worst fears came true,

0:07:23.619,0:07:25.697
their businesses were ready.

0:07:25.697,0:07:30.048
And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true.

0:07:30.048,0:07:33.207
That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear.

0:07:33.207,0:07:38.129
Once in a while, our fears can predict the future.

0:07:38.129,0:07:41.524
But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears

0:07:41.524,0:07:43.922
that our imaginations concoct.

0:07:43.922,0:07:45.906
So how can we tell the difference between

0:07:45.906,0:07:49.726
the fears worth listening to and all the others?

0:07:49.726,0:07:52.203
I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex

0:07:52.203,0:07:56.486
offers an illuminating, if tragic, example.

0:07:56.486,0:08:01.213
After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision.

0:08:01.213,0:08:05.086
Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands

0:08:05.086,0:08:07.413
and instead embarked on the longer

0:08:07.413,0:08:10.540
and much more difficult route to South America.

0:08:10.540,0:08:14.010
After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food

0:08:14.010,0:08:15.089
as they knew they might,

0:08:15.089,0:08:17.784
and they were still quite far from land.

0:08:17.784,0:08:20.671
When the last of the survivors were finally picked up

0:08:20.671,0:08:25.157
by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive,

0:08:25.157,0:08:30.060
and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism.

0:08:30.060,0:08:33.423
Herman Melville, who used this story as research for "Moby Dick,"

0:08:33.423,0:08:37.303
wrote years later, and from dry land, quote,

0:08:37.303,0:08:39.927
"All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex

0:08:39.927,0:08:42.616
might in all human probability have been avoided

0:08:42.616,0:08:45.183
had they, immediately after leaving the wreck,

0:08:45.183,0:08:47.064
steered straight for Tahiti.

0:08:47.064,0:08:51.629
But," as Melville put it, "they dreaded cannibals."

0:08:51.629,0:08:54.675
So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals

0:08:54.675,0:08:58.864
so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation?

0:08:58.864,0:09:00.731
Why were they swayed by one story

0:09:00.731,0:09:03.370
so much more than the other?

0:09:03.370,0:09:04.892
Looked at from this angle,

0:09:04.892,0:09:08.191
theirs becomes a story about reading.

0:09:08.191,0:09:10.847
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader

0:09:10.847,0:09:13.646
has a combination of two very different temperaments,

0:09:13.646,0:09:16.496
the artistic and the scientific.

0:09:16.496,0:09:19.000
A good reader has an artist's passion,

0:09:19.000,0:09:21.423
a willingness to get caught up in the story,

0:09:21.423,0:09:23.534
but just as importantly, the readers also needs

0:09:23.534,0:09:26.745
the coolness of judgment of a scientist,

0:09:26.745,0:09:28.236
which acts to temper and complicate

0:09:28.236,0:09:31.634
the reader's intuitive reactions to the story.

0:09:31.634,0:09:34.839
As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part.

0:09:34.839,0:09:38.479
They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios.

0:09:38.479,0:09:42.468
The problem was that they listened to the wrong story.

0:09:42.468,0:09:44.592
Of all the narratives their fears wrote,

0:09:44.592,0:09:48.243
they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid,

0:09:48.243,0:09:51.462
the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture:

0:09:51.462,0:09:53.413
cannibals.

0:09:53.413,0:09:55.694
But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears

0:09:55.694,0:09:59.175
more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment,

0:09:59.175,0:10:01.935
they would have listened instead to the less violent

0:10:01.935,0:10:05.223
but the more likely tale, the story of starvation,

0:10:05.223,0:10:10.803
and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests.

0:10:10.803,0:10:13.671
And maybe if we all tried to read our fears,

0:10:13.671,0:10:15.648
we too would be less often swayed

0:10:15.648,0:10:17.524
by the most salacious among them.

0:10:17.524,0:10:19.192
Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about

0:10:19.192,0:10:21.380
serial killers and plane crashes,

0:10:21.380,0:10:23.246
and more time concerned with the subtler

0:10:23.246,0:10:25.300
and slower disasters we face:

0:10:25.300,0:10:28.048
the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries,

0:10:28.048,0:10:30.591
the gradual changes in our climate.

0:10:30.591,0:10:34.240
Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest,

0:10:34.240,0:10:38.688
so too might our subtlest fears be the truest.

0:10:38.688,0:10:41.585
Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift

0:10:41.585,0:10:44.517
of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance,

0:10:44.517,0:10:46.752
a way of glimpsing what might be the future

0:10:46.752,0:10:50.187
when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

0:10:50.187,0:10:53.583
Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious

0:10:53.583,0:10:55.740
as our favorite works of literature:

0:10:55.740,0:10:58.785
a little wisdom, a bit of insight

0:10:58.785,0:11:01.359
and a version of that most elusive thing --

0:11:01.359,0:11:02.610
the truth.

0:11:02.610,0:11:07.641
Thank you. (Applause)