Hidden Brain

By Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam

Arts Performing Arts Social Sciences

What's Hidden Brain about?

Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.

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Happiness 2.0: The Path to ...

02.06.2023

Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. ...

Hidden Brain episodes:

02.06.2023 Happiness 2.0: The Path to Contentment Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. ...
01.30.2023 When You Need It To Be True When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. This week, we revisit a favorite episode from 2021, bringing you two stories about how easy it can be ...
01.23.2023 Persuasion: Part 2 Think back to the last time someone convinced you to do something you didn't want to do, or to spend money you didn't want to spend. What techniques did that person use to persuade you? This week, we continue our ...
01.16.2023 Persuasion: Part 1 We all exert pressure on each other in ways small and profound. We recommend movies or books to a friend. We convince a colleague to take a different tactic at work. We lobby a neighbor to vote for our favored ...
01.09.2023 Who's In Your Inner Circle? If you think about the people in your life, it's likely that they share a lot in common with you. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. But, if you dig a little deeper, ...
01.02.2023 Who Do You Want To Be? We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. Parents and peers influence our major life choices. But they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply ...
12.26.2022 You, But Better It's the time of year when many of us make resolutions for the year ahead. We pledge to quit smoking, eat better, or get more exercise. Then a few weeks go by, and we abandon our best-laid plans. That’s because ...
12.19.2022 How to Complain Productively We often look down on people who complain a lot. Yet when something goes wrong in our own lives, many of us go straight to griping, grumbling and kvetching. This week. we talk with psychologist Robin Kowalski about how we ...
12.12.2022 An Ancient Solution to Modern Problems People in every country and culture mark important milestones, such as births, marriages and deaths, with intricately choreographed scripts. We even appeal to supernatural forces to give our favorite sports teams an extra advantage. This week on the show, anthropologist ...
12.05.2022 The Secret to Gift Giving With the holidays upon us, many of us are hunting for that special something for the special someones in our lives. It's how we show we care about them. So why is it so hard to find the right gift? ...
11.28.2022 Relationships 2.0: What Makes Relationships Thrive Everyone wants to be loved and appreciated. In the final episode of our Relationships 2.0 series, we revisit a conversation with psychologist Harry Reis, who says there’s another ingredient to successful relationships that’s every bit as important as love.
11.21.2022 Relationships 2.0: When Did Marriage Become So Hard? No one will deny that marriage is hard. In fact, there's evidence it's getting even harder. This week on the show, we revisit a favorite episode from 2018 about the history of marriage and how it has evolved over time. ...
11.14.2022 Relationships 2.0: An Antidote to Loneliness When you go to a medical appointment, your doctor may ask you several questions. Do you smoke? Have you been getting exercise? Are you sleeping? But rarely do they ask: are you lonely? U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy believes we ...
11.07.2022 Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions As you're going about your day, you likely interact with family, friends and coworkers. These relationships can help you feel cared for and connected. But what if there's a whole category of people in your life whose impact is overlooked? ...
10.31.2022 Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling When it comes to conflict, most of us just want to shut it down. But psychological research is increasingly taking a different approach to discord, with profound implications for disputes big and small. This week, we kick off our Relationships ...
10.24.2022 A Better Way to Worry Anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion, which is why most of us try to avoid it. But psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary says our anxiety is also trying to tell us something. This week, we explore how we can interpret those messages and ...
10.17.2022 Thriving in the Face of Contradiction We all face tough decisions in life, whether we're juggling the demands of work and family or deciding whether to take a new job. These situations often feel like either/or choices. But psychologist Wendy Smith says this binary way of ...
10.10.2022 Did I Really Do That? Have you ever been falsely accused of something? Many of us think there’s only one way we’d act in such a situation: we’d defend ourselves. We’d do whatever it takes to clear our name — and above all else, we’d ...
10.03.2022 Watch Your Mouth If you're bilingual or multilingual, you may have noticed that different languages make you stretch in different ways. This week, we revisit a favorite 2018 conversation with cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky. She studies how the structure of the languages we ...
09.26.2022 Taking Control of Your Time Many of us feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. We struggle to make time for all the competing demands at work and at home, and inevitably feel like we're letting someone down. But what if there were ...
09.19.2022 How to Really Know Another Person So often, we think we know what other people are thinking. But researchers have found that our attempts at reading other people go wrong more often than we realize. This week, we talk with psychologist Tessa West about what we ...
09.12.2022 Decoding Emotions We like to think that all humans are born with the same core emotions: anger, fear, joy, sadness and disgust. But what if that's not true? This week, psychologist Batja Mesquita offers a different model of emotions — one that ...
09.05.2022 Making the World a Safer Place All of us want to feel safe in our daily lives. Yet when we think about crime, our first response is often a blanket approach: find the bad guys, and punish them. But what if there were another way? This ...
08.29.2022 You 2.0: How to Open Your Mind In the United States, we often praise people with strong convictions, and look down on those who express doubt or hesitation. In this favorite 2021 episode, psychologist Adam Grant pushes back against the benefits of certainty and describes the magic ...
08.22.2022 You 2.0: Overcoming Stage Fright The pressure. The expectations. The anxiety. If there’s one thing that many of us have in common, it’s the stress that can come from performing in front of others. In this week’s episode, we revisit our 2021 conversation with cognitive ...
08.15.2022 You 2.0: The Mind's Eye Some challenges can feel insurmountable. But psychologist Emily Balcetis says the solutions are often right in front of our eyes. This week, as part of our annual series on personal growth and reinvention, we revisit a favorite 2020 conversation about ...
08.08.2022 You 2.0: How To See Yourself Clearly How well do we know ourselves? Maybe the better question to ask is how well can we truly know ourselves? Psychologist Tim Wilson says introspection only gets us so far, and that we often make important decisions in life and ...
08.01.2022 You 2.0: Befriending Your Inner Voice You know that negative voice that goes round and round in your head, keeping you up at night? When that negative inner voice gets switched on, it's hard to think about anything else. Psychologist Ethan Kross has a name for ...
07.25.2022 Reframing Your Reality: Part 2 We often assume that we see ourselves and the world around us accurately. But psychologist Alia Crum says that our perceptions are always filtered through our mindsets — and these mindsets shape our lives in subtle but profound ways. In ...
07.18.2022 Reframing Your Reality: Part 1 We often assume that we see ourselves and the world around us accurately. But psychologist Alia Crum says that our perceptions are always filtered through our mindsets — and these mindsets shape our lives in subtle but profound ways. In ...
07.11.2022 Separating Yourself from the Pack Have you ever gotten into a heated argument about politics? Maybe you’ve said something you're not proud of during game night with friends, or booed the opposing team at a sporting event. Psychologist Mina Cikara studies what happens in these ...
07.04.2022 What We Gain from Pain We've all heard the saying, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But is there any truth to this idea? This week, we explore the concept of post-traumatic growth with psychologist Eranda Jayawickreme. He finds that suffering can have benefits ...
06.27.2022 A Founding Contradiction "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Those words, penned by Thomas Jefferson 246 years ago, continue to inspire many Americans. And yet they were written by a man who owned hundreds of enslaved ...
06.20.2022 The Premonition When Paul Burnham was a teenager, he received what felt like a premonition: he would die at the age of 54. Now, he's 54. This week, what his story of confronting death reveals about life.
06.13.2022 Why You're Smarter Than You Think From the time we are schoolchildren, we are ranked and sorted based on how smart we are. But what if our assumptions about intelligence limit our potential? This week, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman proposes a more expansive notion of what ...
06.06.2022 Do Less The human drive to invent new things has led to pathbreaking achievements in medicine, science and society. But our desire for innovation can keep us from seeing one of the most powerful paths to progress: subtraction. Engineer Leidy Klotz says ...
05.30.2022 Money 2.0: Let's Go Shopping! What do the things you buy say about you? Many of us like to think of ourselves as immune to slick advertising and celebrity endorsements. But like it or not, we're communicating messages about ourselves every day with the clothes ...
05.23.2022 Money 2.0: The Rich and the Rest of Us Where do you stand on the income ladder? Do you think of yourself as rich, as poor, or as somewhere in between? Our perceptions of wealth — our own, and other people's — can affect us more profoundly than we ...
05.16.2022 Money 2.0: Emotional Currency What’s the point of money? The answer might seem obvious: we need it to get paid for our work and to buy the things we need. But there’s also a deeper way to look at the role of money in ...
05.09.2022 Money 2.0: Why We Bust Our Budgets Have you had a recent surprise expense? You're not alone. More than half of American households report facing an unplanned financial shock in the last year. This week, in the second part of our new "Money 2.0" series, psychologist Abigail ...
05.02.2022 Money 2.0: Rewrite Your Money Story Money worries are one of the biggest sources of anxiety in the lives of Americans. This week, we kick off our new "Money 2.0" series with psychologist Brad Klontz. He says that while external economic forces often shape our financial ...
04.25.2022 The Logic of Rage Neuroscientist Doug Fields was on a trip to Europe when a pickpocket stole his wallet. Doug, normally mild-mannered, became enraged — and his fury turned him into a stranger to himself. This week, we revisit a favorite 2020 episode about ...
04.18.2022 When Doing Right Feels Wrong Have you ever been in a position where you had to choose between someone you care about and a value that you hold dear? This week, we tell the story of a Detroit police officer who found himself in this ...
04.14.2022 A Conspiracy of Silence We all self-censor at times. We keep quiet at dinner with our in-laws, or nod passively in a work meeting. But what happens when we take this deception a step further, and pretend we believe the opposite of what we ...
04.11.2022 How Rude! It’s not your imagination: rudeness appears to be on the rise. Witnessing rude behavior — whether it's coming from angry customers berating a store clerk or airline passengers getting into a fistfight — can have long-lasting effects on our minds. ...
04.04.2022 Healing Your Heart We’ve all heard about the five stages of grief. But what happens when your experience doesn’t follow that model at all? Resilience researcher Lucy Hone began to question how we think about grief after a devastating loss in her own ...
03.28.2022 You Don't Need a Crystal Ball When disaster strikes — from the explosion of a space shuttle to the spread of a deadly virus — we want to know whether we could have avoided catastrophe. Did anyone speak up with concerns about the situation? And if ...
03.21.2022 How to Change the World Does power truly flow from the barrel of a gun? Pop culture and conventional history often teach us that violence is the most effective way to produce change. But is that common assumption actually true? Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who ...
03.17.2022 You Can't Hit Unsend Social media sites offer quick and easy ways to share ideas, crack jokes, find old friends. They can make us feel part of something big and wonderful and fast-moving. But the things we post don’t go away. And they can ...
03.14.2022 The Benefits of Mixed Emotions We've all been in situations where we experience mixed emotions. Maybe you've felt both joy and sadness during a big life decision, such as whether to purchase a home or accept a job offer. Or maybe you've experienced mixed feelings ...

Older episodes

Hidden Brain

What's Hidden Brain about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Hidden Brain episodes:

Happiness 2.0: The Path to Contentment

When You Need It To Be True

Persuasion: Part 2

Persuasion: Part 1

Who's In Your Inner Circle?

Who Do You Want To Be?

You, But Better

How to Complain Productively

An Ancient Solution to Modern Problems

The Secret to Gift Giving

Relationships 2.0: What Makes Relationships Thrive

Relationships 2.0: When Did Marriage Become So Hard?

Relationships 2.0: An Antidote to Loneliness

Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions

Relationships 2.0: How To Keep Conflict From Spiraling

A Better Way to Worry

Thriving in the Face of Contradiction

Did I Really Do That?

Watch Your Mouth

Taking Control of Your Time

How to Really Know Another Person

Decoding Emotions

Making the World a Safer Place

You 2.0: How to Open Your Mind

You 2.0: Overcoming Stage Fright

You 2.0: The Mind's Eye

You 2.0: How To See Yourself Clearly

You 2.0: Befriending Your Inner Voice

Reframing Your Reality: Part 2

Reframing Your Reality: Part 1

Separating Yourself from the Pack

What We Gain from Pain

A Founding Contradiction

The Premonition

Why You're Smarter Than You Think

Do Less

Money 2.0: Let's Go Shopping!

Money 2.0: The Rich and the Rest of Us

Money 2.0: Emotional Currency

Money 2.0: Why We Bust Our Budgets

Money 2.0: Rewrite Your Money Story

The Logic of Rage

When Doing Right Feels Wrong

A Conspiracy of Silence

How Rude!

Healing Your Heart

You Don't Need a Crystal Ball

How to Change the World

You Can't Hit Unsend

The Benefits of Mixed Emotions

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