The Science Behind Talking To Yourself
29:57 Share

This message comes from Carvana. Whether you need weeks to research the perfect car or know exactly what you want, Carvana makes car buying easy. Choose from Carvana's massive inventory using customizable search tools. However you buy, buy your car with Carvana.

Have you ever gotten into an impassioned argument in the shower with a sparring partner who actually wasn't there? How about replaying a dinner conversation from weeks ago, but this time you know exactly what to say and you're saying it only to yourself? Or have you ever muttered under your breath, where did I put my keys? Where did I put my keys? While searching for them around the house. For a number of you, the answer is yes.

Yes, I talk to myself all the time. I have arguments with myself, you know, and lose. I grew up as an only child, so maybe that has something to do with it. But one thing I recognize is that I will have an argument in my mind, you know, with someone who isn't there and work myself up into a state. And I have to tell myself, hey, hey, stop. You can't get all wild up, you know, in an argument with someone who isn't even here.

For the past 30 years, I've been a traveling farm tractor mechanic in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, which often put me on hundreds of acres all by myself. And believe me, I would talk to myself a lot. I don't talk to myself, but I learned that my husband does shortly after we were married when I heard him say something from the other room. And I said, what was that?

And he said, oh, I was talking to myself. And I said, oh, okay. Well, what were you saying? And he paused and he said, I was talking to myself. I thought it was so funny. Thanks for those messages. And yes, on more than one occasion, my husband has said, what'd you say? I'm like,

Dude, I'm talking to myself. It's fine. Whether the dialogue is in our heads or said out loud, many of us talk to ourselves even if we don't realize it. But oftentimes the habit is seen as strange, especially if there are other people around. Why do we talk to ourselves? What are the benefits of self-talk? And when should we be concerned about it? I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast, where we get to the heart of the story. We'll be back with more in just a moment.

This is Eric Glass. On This American Life, we like stories that surprise you. For instance, imagine finding a new hobby and realizing... To do this hobby right, according to the ways of the masters, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to have to bend the law to get the materials that you need. If not break it. Yeah, to break international laws. Your life stories, really good ones. This American Life.

Let's bring in our panel. Joining us for this discussion is Gary Lupien. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he studies self-talk and language. Professor Lupien, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me. Also with us is Dr. Jessica Gold. She's an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She's also the author of the book, How Do You Feel? One Doctor's Search for Humanity in Medicine. Dr. Gold, welcome back to the program.

Thanks for having me. Professor Lupien, what are the different types of self-talk we engage in? How are they different? So sometimes we talk out loud to ourselves, as some of those recordings from listeners indicated. So this is far more common. Most people, a large majority, report doing this. Even more common is just inner speech. Many people report that that's just how they think. And in fact, we had a recent paper showing that that's not the case for everyone, but

We tend to assume that our thinking mirrors that of other people. And the majority do report that most of their thinking is in the form of language. But you have some people who say, I thought that was just a figure of speech. That's just what they do in the movies. I didn't realize that most people actually experience their thinking this way. So one answer is inner speech, self-talk is just part of how we think through things. Do we know why?

It's thought that this comes online as you learn language in childhood, and it becomes internalized over time. So this is just an outgrowth of regular public language use. Well, let's go to our inbox.

On the subject of talking to yourself, I've been doing that for years and it makes my wife very uncomfortable, but I've always found it helpful and staying organized. If I was doing it in a room full of people who could hear me, I would think that was not good.

We also got this message from Mike who writes, Dr. Gold, why do we often associate talking out loud to ourselves as meaning something's wrong?

I think that we don't see a lot of examples of it being normalized, even though it is. So I think what we see on TV, what we hear about in the news is often the people who show up in my office and who are talking to themselves because they are experiencing psychosis. And I don't think we see it as something that people just do. I think we see it in the movies sometimes because it's a, it's a,

thing that they do to show us what's going on in their heads, you know, so we can actually see it. But I don't think people see that like, oh, they're doing that because all of us do that. They say like, oh, that seems like a device. So I think it's just, we're not used to it. But it is super common. And if you think about even just athletes, when they're trying to motivate themselves for a race or a game or something, people often are talking to themselves and trying to pump themselves up. And we all do it in some capacity. I think it's just not talked about enough.

Well, later we'll talk about when to be concerned about talking to yourself. But first, here's a message we got from clinical health psychologist Grace Torek from the Cleveland Clinic about the benefits of self-talk. There are quite a few benefits of talking to yourself as self-talk can serve numerous different purposes. These purposes can be critical thinking, you know, making different evaluations, judgments throughout your day, regulation, especially for emotions, or

keeping ourselves on task when we are in stressful situations, allowing us to problem solve when we may be under pressure, planning, reducing stress, and regulating our overall emotions.

processing different emotions throughout our day, recalling recent events, motivating ourselves based on past experiences. An example might be, I've done this before. I know I can do it again. Now, Professor Lupien, you also research the benefits of self-talk when it comes to helping us remember important information. Now, if you're a person of a certain age, you might remember this animated short from Sesame Street. Now, don't forget a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.

If you can't remember, I'll write it down for you. That's okay, Mommy. I won't forget. I remember. Loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.

A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter. Now, I'll admit, I still use this. I still do this as an adult. If I need to do a quick run of the store, I'll figure out what those four things are that I need, and I'll say, okay, I know I need four things. And as long as I can repeat them, one, two, three, four, I can typically remember what it is. Professor Lupien, what's the relationship between self-talk and memory?

So in this recent study, we found that if people are shown a list of words to remember, those who report having less inner speech have a harder time remembering the words. But people who on their own rehearse the words out loud, this is not something that everyone does, but I think it was about maybe 30% of people reported doing that. When they did that, people with less inner speech...

their memory improved. So it helped saying it out loud sort of helped compensate for less inner speech. But people with typical amounts of inner speech presumably are doing this spontaneously. And so actually saying it out loud in that case didn't help over and above just kind of saying the words in your head. I'm wondering if it's because we're creating maybe a bit of a

I don't know if a feedback loop is the right term for it, but we're both speaking it and hearing it when we say it out loud, and that reinforces our memory? That's one possibility, yes. So when you say something out loud, you also, of course, hear it. And so it's just more overt, more pronounced.

Often inner speech is a term people use as condensed. And so you hear it, but it's kind of in the mind's ear, but not to the same extent as you actually hear it if you say it out loud. And so you might expect that saying things out loud just exaggerates whatever the effects of inner speech are. Let's go back to her voicemail box. This is a message we got from Cindy.

I'm a single mother with two now adult children. And I find that when I'm doing a lot of self-talk, I'm trying to sort out in my mind how to respond or change.

somehow interact with my now adult children. And it's really a red flag for me to back off and mind my own business. When I start talking to myself about how I should advise them or counsel them, 99% of the time, it is something I snap out of and say, you know what? It's none of my business. And I need to let my kids live their life.

We also got this message from Chris. He writes, I commonly rehearse hard conversations and potential arguments that I might have with my kids, workmates, partner, and family members while I'm driving by myself. I find that talking out loud about the issue helps me think through the issue, possibly calm down a bit, and figure out how to present my perspective in an effective and assertive way instead of being loud, aggressive, and argumentative. Dr. Gold, how can talking to ourselves help us prepare for these future conversations we may be bracing ourselves for?

Yeah, I mean, in therapy, we call that scripting. So basically, when you're having an argument or you might go have an argument or want to have an argument, you have a lot of emotions about what kind of conversation you're hoping to have, right? Like you are preparing for it, but you don't want to let your emotions take over. And so if you work out different ways to have those conversations, like I might talk to someone this way. What does that sound like? How do I feel? I might talk to someone this way. What does that sound like? How might they respond? You

It lets you kind of figure out like what way you want to go about doing it and work that out. Also lets emotion and especially anxiety kind of get out of the equation because when you go to have a hard conversation or you go to talk to someone about something you're worried about, you often just say like whatever comes to your mind and then you regret it later.

And so it lets you have a little more preparation and take that anxiety away. And I think it's really healthy for people to do that, especially like before the holidays with family, if you know how things are typically going to go, being able to say, well, Uncle John always says this to me. How do I respond to Uncle John without causing Uncle John to fly off the handle? You know, and you can really work through that before you're in those situations. It can be really comforting for people. But as we also heard from Cindy earlier,

She uses self-talk to check in with herself about overstepping in her children's lives. So how can the act of self-talk also be a signal that we might need to maybe pause or slow down before we do the thing we're going to do? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think what she's kind of talking about is almost like journaling in your head, right? You're sort of saying like, this is what I'm thinking about. This is what I'm worried about. Is this, what does this mean? And how did I get here? And is this what I want to talk to my kids about? And I think having the time to actually like hear your thoughts or, you know, pause and actually be present with yourself is super important. We don't do that a lot. We spend a lot of time checking on other people, especially as a mom or especially as a teacher or these other jobs where that's your job to take care of other people and not yourselves.

So being able to kind of pause, go into your head for a second, work something out and see what the result is will either tell you like, oh, I feel better just having done that. Or I actually do need to have that conversation. Like, what will that look like? And then maybe you jump into the scripting kind of version of it, too. We're going to head to a quick break. When we return, we explore the role of compassion in self-talk. We'll be right back.

Ho, ho, ho! Santa here, coming to you from the North Pole, where the elves in our podcast division have just completed work on this season's best gift for public radio lovers, NPR+. Give the gift of sponsored free listening and even bonus episodes from your favorite NPR podcasts, all while supporting public media. Learn more at plus.npr.org. Ho, ho, ho, ho!

What's good, y'all? It's Gene Demby from Code Switch. And on Code Switch, we are deeply curious about race and identity and the way it shows up in the news headlines or in our personal lives. With the wide range of voices in front of and behind the mic, we see how race shows up all over the place. So come rock with us on the Code Switch podcast only from NPR.

Let's jump back into our conversation about self-talk.

Professor Lupien, how is having a conversation with yourself the way you might with another person different from narrating your actions in order to jog your memory? So, you know, on this side, you have maybe a conversation you're preparing yourself for. How is that different than trying to remember the grocery list?

Yeah, as Dr. Gold mentioned, I mean, language is one way that we externalize our thinking and it allows us to reflect on our ideas. So it's as though they are...

out there as objects that we can inspect, similar to writing things down. That's another way we externalize our thoughts. And so there's lots of evidence that this can help with executive control. So if you want to inhibit some action, saying it out loud can help you kind of put it out there that this is the thing I don't want to do. There's also evidence that

When we are in situations where we have to keep track of, okay, this is the thing I'm doing next.

self-talk, inner speech can help us keep track of where we are. So there's a famous example of kids learning to tie their shoes and talking themselves through the steps of tying a knot, right? And so you might say, well, they already know how to do it. Why does talking to yourself matter? But there isn't one part of your mind that knows everything that you as a whole person knows. And so actually producing

producing that language helps to keep track of where you are in the sequence. So it not only jots your memory, but it helps you figure out, okay, what is the thing I'm going to do next? Did you go from a psychiatrist's perspective? When should you be concerned about self-talk?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you asked at the beginning, like, why do we all think this is a problem? And I think that we immediately go to that. So just talking to yourself is not a problem. Just talking to yourself out loud is not a problem. So I want to say that first and foremost, because I think most people listening might be like, oh, wait, red flag.

But to me, it's like, are you having a conversation with somebody else and actually hearing their responses? Are those voices talking to each other? Are those voices telling you to do things that are like dangerous, like hurting yourself? Because that's very different than a voice that's just your voice and you're hearing it in a different way. I think...

how much it interferes with your life is also relevant. So if you're just talking to yourself, only yourself and not interacting with the world, that would also be concerning. Or if it's taking up the majority of your day and you're not able to do the things that you want to do, that would also be concerning. So how much time are they voices that are talking to each other or in your head, are you talking to an actual person? And then it's more like a hallucination and psychosis. And like, how severe are those voices and what are they saying would be big warning signs for me. Yeah.

Let's go to this message we got from Bo in Oklahoma. I wanted to comment on the self-talk strategies. I'm actually the director of sports psychology at East Central University here in Oklahoma. And I actually teach athletes and coaches self-talk strategies every day. And so...

I really just wanted to say I think that it's extremely important to make sure that when you're utilizing these types of strategies, when you're dialing in on that what's called negative and positive, I like to flip it around to something more of a productive versus counterproductive. Is it working for me or is it not working for me? Because sometimes when we look at what's negative for somebody, it might be positive for them. It actually might work for them.

So, Dr. Gold, briefly, where is that line for when sort of drumming up motivation through self-talk starts to come at the expense of your self-esteem or mental well-being?

Yeah, I mean, I think words like positive and negative are always hard. We use them with emotions, but that's also subjective. Like a negative emotion is anger. I like anger. Sometimes anger is great. And I think it can be really motivating and it tells you something. So our self-talk always tells us something. So if the thing is negative that you're hearing, it might tell you something. You might be a person who thrives on some of the negative stuff. But I don't know that there's a clear line like, okay, now it's a problem and I need to be concerned. It's more like, well...

is that causing an issue to how I'm feeling? And so reflecting on what the self-talk makes you feel is, I think, the first place for that. Professor Lupien, as someone who studies language, how can verbalizing our thoughts help us see them more clearly, help us better understand what we're actually thinking?

One way in that is that language commits us to a certain interpretation. So words are categories and many of the things in that world are not categorical in this way. And so when we talk, whether out loud or to ourselves, we are by sort of putting our thoughts into words categorical.

we're committing to some set of categories, right? And so if you are asking yourself whether you're feeling a certain way, well, those words, those names, the feelings are categories. And so you are committing yourself to a particular category, which you can then inspect. And if it's out there and you can ask yourself, am I really feeling this way or not? And it seems that that helps compared to just

thinking about it in a sort of a vaguer sense.

I want to go to a couple of messages we got. Amber writes, I only talk to myself when I do something stupid, like walk through a doorway with my elbows out. I'll then chastise myself out loud by saying, you idiot or dummy, you know better, but it's more colorful with curse words. We also got this message from M who writes, I talk to myself all day in my head. I've done it since I can remember. It's all negative. No one has ever been more cruel than I have been to myself. I don't know how to stop.

Dr. Gold, you wanted to make sure self-compassion was part of this conversation. Why is that an important factor in this discussion about how and why we speak to ourselves?

Yeah, it's important because we can't control what other people think and feel, but we can control how we talk to ourselves and how we feel. And the things that we say to ourselves, we wouldn't say to a friend. Like if a friend did something like make a mistake and then they were like, well, I did this, you wouldn't be like, that's because you're an idiot or that's because you're a bad mom or a bad doctor or a bad human, right? But our brains go right to that. And if you heard that out loud, you would never be friends with yourself. So it's really important that you basically pause

pause and find a way to recognize some of those thoughts and reframe them to be nicer, which is what self-compassion is. Like, how do you talk to yourself like you're talking to a friend? Instead of, I'm an idiot, I'm a klutz, I failed that test, I don't deserve to be here, something like,

Sometimes people don't do well on tests and it's okay, it doesn't define you. Like this more balanced thought can make your life so much better. You might not catch it every single time, but even catching it like once a day might make it so the rest of the things you're having more ability to feel reactive to and not so mean to yourself at the same time.

That leads us to this email we got from Irene who says,

Then I hear my adult voice talking to my younger self. Baby, of course you can do it. You can do anything you put your heart into. It helps me to negate negative images of self-esteem and imposter syndrome. I feel like I gave myself self-therapy at no cost. What are some other techniques people can employ to become more compassionate in their self-talk, Dr. Gold?

I think that what she's doing is instead of talking to herself like she would a friend, she's talking to herself like the younger version of herself. Both of those are really great techniques in order to basically reframe what you're thinking. And that's kind of where you go for step two. Step one is what am I saying to myself and when is that coming up and how does that look?

Because a lot of times we don't catch it, right? If we catch it, we can go, oh, there I go doing that again. Oh, there I go being mean to myself again. But if we aren't catching it and it's just kind of part of our daily routine, we don't recognize how often we harp on the negative and harp on ourselves with self-criticism. And so recognizing it is the first

step. Once you recognize it, it'll be a lot easier to do the second step, which is kind of what she's saying, either talk to yourself like a friend or talk to yourself like the younger version of yourself. And it'll feel a lot better in all of those ways, in all of those different occasions where it comes up much more than we probably even realize because it's kind of like self-nature, like just keep doing that over and over. Is it possible that some of the work might also be about

identifying where that script came from, that it may not be your script that you're repeating over and over again. It may be someone else's. Yeah. I mean, it totally, it definitely is. It's like the thing that we grew up in and how someone else might have responded to our mistakes when we were younger. It's how we value failure. Like where does failure come into your household? Did you see your parents fail or the person you kind of look up to? Is that something you saw happen? And so if you didn't see it happen, you think it's not possible to happen. So you think

really negatively about yourself if it does happen. So those scripts so much come from where we were raised, the culture we work in, the culture that we continue to kind of grow up in. And so recognizing that, being aware of where that's coming from and breaking that down can be really helpful. Therapy is great for that, obviously, but

you know, access is a problem, but kind of being aware of that while you're trying to break that down yourself, looking at some of Kristen Neff's work on self-compassion, she has a bunch of good workbooks that you can do on your own. So if that's a good place to start for you to kind of recognize where it's coming from, that could be really helpful too. Let's pause here. After the break, we get into how those experiencing grief, loneliness, or isolation may be more likely to use self-talk to cope. Stay with us.

Have you ever been on a date with someone and suddenly found yourself disgusted by something they did? Well, you might have gotten the ick. On It's Been a Minute, we're asking the big questions about dating, like what's actually happening when we get the ick? And is it about them or about you? To find out, listen now to the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR.

This message comes from Grammarly. 231 is the average number of apps used by many companies. This can drain employee focus. Grammarly can help. Grammarly's AI works in over 500,000 apps and websites, making it easy for your team to write clearly and on brand without disrupting workflow. Join 70,000 teams who save an average of $5,000 per employee per year using Grammarly. Go to grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more.

Now back to our conversation about talking to ourselves. I mean, Professor Lupien, is this, is it about having an internal dialogue and language or for some people having an internal dialogue, but it just looks a little different or it sounds a little different? Because you said not everyone processes in this way. So this is a topic of current investigation. There has been in general an assumption that this is a universal topic.

And as it has happened with many of such assumptions, it seems to be wrong. And so many people thought that visual imagery was universal. We now know that there is a range. Most people have fairly vivid visual imagery and some people have very little or none. And because it's a subjective experience, it's kind of like pain. You really, to some extent, have to go on what people say and what they report.

There's no way to objectively measure it. It does correlate with various behavioral and neural measures, but in the end, we come down to a subjective report. And so in our studies of inner speech, it seems to have a very similar distribution with most people have quite a lot, and then you have a few percent who

who, as I mentioned before, are shocked to discover that most other people experience a lot of inner speech and that it's not just a figure of speech. It really mirrors the reports on aphantasia, lack of visual imagery, where people are shocked to discover that there is even variation in inner speech.

along this dimension. I noticed that Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist at Penn, posted on his Facebook that he's now talking about a particular kind of inner speech experience of hearing a voice when you read, that he's never heard a voice when you read and is shocked to realize that most people do.

And I remember as a graduate student doing a survey where I included some questions about hearing a voice when you read. And I thought these were college students. They're all expert readers. We know that when kids are learning to read, they read out loud and it takes time to read silently. And I was shocked to realize that, oh, no, you know, 70% of people or so report that all the time they hear a voice.

And as someone who doesn't really hear a voice when I read or I can if I want to, but it doesn't come automatically, I was shocked because I naively assumed that, oh, that's my experience is just like everyone else's.

And so you have this interesting back and forth where people who are more typical in this way, who hear a voice in conversation with people who say they don't really hear a voice, an inner voice, they think, well, how can you think? Yeah.

What do you mean you don't hear a voice? Doesn't that mean that you're not thinking? And there are different ways of thinking. There are different modes. And we know much more about thinking sort of in this more verbal way than we do about these alternative ways of working through thoughts and experiencing our thoughts. And there's a lot to learn there.

Let's go back to our inbox for one more message we got from Bebe in Tennessee. I talk to myself all the time now. My dog passed in July, and we would have running conversations all day long. And I would find myself going into stores, you know, just talking, you know, thinking like he's there beside me, like we talk about the day, about the weather, what's going on, what's happening in the world. I mean, he was a very good conversationalist, and I find that I've just continued since he's been gone.

Bebe, thanks for that message. We also got this email from Pat who writes, I lost my husband five years ago. I feel like he is part of me. We were married for over 50 years. I talk to him every day. I usually say, hi, sweetheart. I love you. Often when I'm taking a walk where we used to walk together, I can feel the serotonin when I do so. Almost a warm, happy feeling.

Dr. Gold, in the case of grief, you may not be exactly talking to yourself, but to loved ones who are no longer there to receive your words. How can talking out loud to someone who's not present help us cope with that loss?

Yeah, grief isn't a really important time for self-talk or, you know, talking to somebody who is not there anymore. So I guess it's technically yourself at that point. But, you know, it's a really strong way to continue bonds. So it's like, it's called the continuing bonds theory, actually, which just basically means like death ends a life, but doesn't end your relationship with that person. And it lets you continue that comfort, continue that support, continue that like connection. And I think it

probably does fade over time, but in the acute sense of grief, it might be different than like later on. And it might be something you do when you just go to the grave and check in on an anniversary, but it's a way to stay connected to that person and keep a relationship with that person or that dog. And I think it's really important that people don't judge themselves for things like that,

because it is a way to cope and it is a way to survive and it's a way to keep those connections, especially when something happens suddenly and you're in disbelief and you sort of need to just process that with the person, even if the person's not there. So it's a really healthy way to cope with grief, I think.

We got this from John who writes, I wanted to know if anyone has written conversations with themselves. I've been doing this now for several years and have pages of conversations with myself that have been some of the best therapy I've ever had. I asked myself about an issue I'm having difficulty with and respond to myself intuitively. And the answers I get have been very supportive and effective.

For those who perhaps want to start talking to themselves more or at least have more control over their self-talk habits, Dr. Gold, what advice do you have?

Yeah, I mean, I think what he's talking about is journaling. I think that can be a safe place for people to start writing down stuff if they're not comfortable speaking out loud or talking to themselves without like knowing exactly where that could lead. Journaling is really easy and there's lots of evidence on journaling. So five to 15 minutes of just sitting there reflecting, don't cross stuff out, don't really like try to edit it or hyper edit it.

Use a pen and pencil or use a piece of paper if you can. Don't do it on your computer and just kind of write what's in your head. And if that's working something out, if that's answering a question, it's definitely a great place to start. If you don't want to journal and you're much more into just talking to yourself, we have voice notes on our phones.

When I was in residency, when I was driving home from work, I would just kind of basically verbal journal and say, like, here's my day and da-da-da. And I'd record myself on my iPhone. And those are interesting things to look back to and listen to, but also are, you know, great ways to work things out and talk about your day and feel like you're doing something that's maybe not like just talking to yourself in your house. And so you can start there, too. I think that's a really easy place to start. Professor Lupien, as we wrap up here, in terms of research,

What big questions are you still interested in learning more about?

We're trying to really get to the bottom of what underlines this apparent variation in inner speech. And so how does it come to develop? Is it stable throughout life? Does it change with development? And what are the various behavioral and cognitive consequences of having more versus less inner speech? Interestingly, despite the sort of myth that there are verbal people and visual people, these things actually are positively related. So people who report having more inner speech also report having more visual imagery.

And so you've got folks who report not having much imagery, not having much inner speech. So what is their thinking really like? And that's something that we're very interested in understanding just to appreciate the diversity of human experience and thought.

That's Gary Lupien. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies self-talk and language. Also with us today, Dr. Jessica Gold. She's an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. She's also the author of the book, How Do You Feel? One Doctor's Search for Humanity in Medicine. Thanks to you both.

Today's producer was Haley Blassingame. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR. I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening. Thanks for talking to us. And we will talk more soon. This is 1A.

This message comes from Doctors Without Borders. When an emergency strikes, every second counts. For Doctors Without Borders teams around the world, seconds can often mean the difference between life and death. So they don't waste a single one. Every second and every dollar is a critical resource that means more vaccines given, more wounds bandaged, more surgeries performed, and more life-saving research done.

Learn how to make a life-saving donation today at doctorswithoutborders.org slash NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Odoo. Is expensive, disconnected software causing a lot of chaos at your company? Then it's time to find peace with Odoo. Odoo is simple, affordable, all-in-one management software for every business. Sign up today at odoo.com.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Capital One. With the Spark Cash Plus card, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase for your business. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Spark Cash Plus. Terms and conditions apply.