Hidden Brain

By NPR

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.

4.5

24,866 ratings

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Close Enough: Living Throug...

03.30.2020

A silver lining of social distancing: you may have more time and space to pursue the projects you've bookmarked on your web browser. Whether your goal is to build a barn door or to update your makeup routine, online tutorials ...

Hidden Brain episodes:

03.30.2020 Close Enough: Living Through Others A silver lining of social distancing: you may have more time and space to pursue the projects you've bookmarked on your web browser. Whether your goal is to build a barn door or to update your makeup routine, online tutorials ...
03.23.2020 An Unfinished Lesson A virus is more than a biological organism. It's a social organism. It detects fissures in societies and fault lines between communities. Historian Nancy Bristow shares the lessons about human behavior that we can take away from a century-old pandemic.
03.16.2020 Panic In The Street It sounds like a movie plot: police discover the body of a young man who's been murdered. The body tests positive for a deadly infectious disease. Authorities trace the killing to a gang. They race to find the gang members, ...
03.10.2020 The Bomb That Didn't Explode We know that we live in an ever-changing world, but one thing we often overlook is demographic change. Whether the world's population is growing or shrinking can affect many aspects of our lives, from the number of kids we have ...
03.03.2020 The Tale of the Cowboy Philosopher In 2009, an old man died in a California nursing home. His obituary included not just his given name, but a long list of the pseudonyms he'd been known to use. In this episode, which we originally released in 2019, ...
02.24.2020 The Influence You Have Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn't stop to think about the pressure you were exerting on that ...
02.17.2020 Liar, Liar, Liar We all lie. But what separates the average person from the infamous cheaters we see on the news? Dan Ariely says we like to think it's character — but in his research he's found it's more often opportunity. Dan Ariely ...
02.10.2020 Passion Isn't Enough Many Americans feel an obligation to keep up with political news. But maybe we should be focusing our energies elsewhere. Political scientist Eitan Hersh says there's been a rise in "political hobbyism" in the United States. We treat politics like ...
02.04.2020 When Things Click There can be a lot of psychological noise involved in teaching. But what if we replaced all that mental clutter...with a click? This week, we bring you a 2018 episode exploring an innovative idea about how we learn. It will ...
01.27.2020 Secret Friends Where is the line between what is real and what is imaginary? It seems like an easy question to answer: if you can see it, hear it, or touch it, then it's real, right? But what if this way of ...
01.20.2020 Warnings, Warnings Everywhere After a disaster happens, we want to know whether something could have been done to avoid it. Did anyone see this coming? Many times, the answer is yes. So why didn't the warnings lead to action? This week, we revisit ...
01.13.2020 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 ...
01.06.2020 On The Knife's Edge What would drive someone to take another person's life? When researchers at the University of Chicago asked that question, the answer was a laundry list of slights: a stolen jacket, or a carelessly lobbed insult. It made them wonder whether ...
12.30.2019 Creatures Of Habit At the beginning of the year, many of us make resolutions for the months to come. We resolve to work out more, procrastinate less, or save more money. Though some people stick with these aspirations, many of us fall short. ...
12.23.2019 Why We Love Surprises Why do we fall for surprise endings? It turns out that our capacity to be easily fooled in books and movies is made possible by a handful of predictable mental shortcuts. In this 2018 conversation, we talk with Vera Tobin, ...
12.17.2019 Did That Really Happen? Our memories are easily contaminated. We can be made to believe we rode in a hot air balloon or kissed a magnifying glass — even if those things never happened. So how do we know which of our memories are ...
12.09.2019 Zipcode Destiny There's a core belief embedded in the story of the United States — the American Dream. Today we look at the state of that dream as we revisit our 2018 conversation with economist Raj Chetty. We'll ask some questions that ...
12.03.2019 In The Heat Of The Moment In a fit of anger or in the grip of fear, many of us make decisions that we never would have anticipated. This week, we look at situations that make us strangers to ourselves — and why it's so difficult ...
11.25.2019 Counting Other People's Blessings Envy is one of the most unpleasant of all human emotions. It also turns out to be one of the most difficult for researchers to study. And yet, there's mounting evidence that envy is a powerful motivator. This week, we ...
11.19.2019 The Ventilator Many of us believe we know how we'd choose to die. We have a sense of how we'd respond to a diagnosis of an incurable illness. This week, we have the story of one family's decades-long conversation about dying. What ...
11.11.2019 Hungry, Hungry Hippocampus Anyone who's tried (and failed) to follow a diet knows that food is more than fuel. This week, we revisit our 2018 episode about the psychology behind what we eat, what we spit out, and when we come back for ...
11.04.2019 The Talk Market Can we affect the rise and fall of the economy? This week on Hidden Brain, we talk with Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller about the powerful ways in which stories and psychology shape our economic lives. He argues that narratives ...
10.28.2019 BS Jobs Have you ever had a job where you had to stop and ask yourself: what am I doing here? If I quit tomorrow, would anyone even notice? This week on Hidden Brain, we revisit our 2018 conversation with anthropologist David ...
10.21.2019 The Monkey Marketplace What makes the mind of a human different from that of other animals? Psychologist Laurie Santos says we can't know the answer to that question if we only study humans. This week, we turn to Laurie's work with monkeys to ...
10.14.2019 The Lonely American Man Boys get the message at a young age: don't show your feelings. Don't rely on anyone. This week, we bring you a favorite 2018 episode about misguided notions of masculinity in the United States. We explore how these notions create ...
10.07.2019 Screaming Into The Void Turn on the news or look at Twitter, and it's likely you'll be bombarded by outrage. Many people have come to believe that the only way to spark change is to incite anger. This week on Hidden Brain, how outrage ...
09.30.2019 Baby Talk Babies are speaking to us all the time, but most of us have no clue what they're saying. To researchers, though, the babbling of babies is knowable, predictable, and best of all, teachable to us non-experts. This week, we revisit ...
09.23.2019 We're All Gonna Live Forever! Last week, we spoke with psychologist Sheldon Solomon about the fear of death and how it shapes our actions. This week, we pivot from psychology and politics to religion and history as we explore how people have tried to resolve ...
09.16.2019 We're All Gonna Die! Death may be inescapable, but we do our best to avoid thinking about it. Psychologist Sheldon Solomon says we're not very successful though. This week on Hidden Brain, we confront how death anxiety courses through our actions, even when we ...
09.10.2019 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 ...
09.02.2019 You 2.0: Decide Already! For the last episode in our You 2.0 series, we bring you a favorite conversation with Harvard researcher Dan Gilbert. He explains why we're bad at predicting our future happiness, how that affects our decision making, and why we're actually ...
08.27.2019 You 2.0: Deep Work When your phone buzzes or a notification pops up your screen, do you stop what you're doing to look and respond? That's what many of us are doing. Even though we think we should be less distracted by technology, we ...
08.19.2019 You 2.0: Rebel With A Cause Francesca Gino studies rebels — people who practice "positive deviance" and achieve incredible feats of imagination. They know how, and when, to break the rules that should be broken. So how can you activate your own inner non-conformist? This week, ...
08.12.2019 You 2.0: Our Better Nature If you live in a big city, you may have noticed new buildings popping up — a high-rise here, a skyscraper there. The concrete jungles that we've built over the past century have allowed millions of us to live in ...
08.05.2019 You 2.0: Tunnel Vision When you're hungry, it can be hard to think of anything other than food. When you're desperately poor, you may constantly worry about making ends meet. When you're lonely, you might obsess about making friends. This week, as part of ...
07.29.2019 You 2.0: The Empathy Gym Some people are good at putting themselves in another person's shoes. Others may struggle to relate. But psychologist Jamil Zaki argues that empathy isn't a fixed trait. This week: how to exercise our empathetic muscles. It's the first episode in ...
07.22.2019 Facts Aren't Enough Sometimes when we believe something, we resist data that can change our minds. This week, we look at how we rely on the people we trust to shape what we believe, and why emotions can be more powerful than facts. ...
07.15.2019 Finding Your Voice At some point in our lives, many of us realize that the way we hear our own voice isn't the way others hear us. This week on Hidden Brain, we look at the relationship between our voices and our identities. ...
07.08.2019 The Fox And The Hedgehog The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This week, we'll use the metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog as a way to understand the differences between tacticians and ...
07.01.2019 I Buy, Therefore I Am All of us are surrounded by brands. Designer brands. Bargain-shopper brands. Brands for seemingly every demographic slice among us. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself how brands influence you? This week, we look at how companies create a ...
06.24.2019 The Lazarus Drug More than 70,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2017 — many of them from heroin and other opioids. One of the most widely-used tools to confront this crisis is a drug called naloxone. It can reverse an opioid overdose ...
06.17.2019 Our Animal Instincts Does living with animals really make us healthier? Why do we eat some animals and keep others as pets? This week on Hidden Brain, we talk with psychology professor Hal Herzog about the contradictions embedded in our relationships with animals.
06.10.2019 Me, Myself, and IKEA Are women named Virginia more likely to move to Virginia? Are people with the last name of Carpenter more likely to be carpenters? This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you a favorite 2017 episode about our preference for things ...
06.03.2019 People Like Us Generations of Americans have struggled against segregation. Most of us believe in the ideal of a colorblind society. But what happens when that ideal come up against research that finds colorblindness sometimes leads to worse outcomes?
05.27.2019 More Divided Than Ever? Many of us intuitively feel that the bitter partisanship of American politics is bad for our nation. So should we be concerned about the health of our democracy? This week on Hidden Brain, we revisit two of our favorite conversations ...
05.20.2019 Losing Face It happens to all of us: someone recognizes you on the street, calls you by name, and says hello. You, meanwhile, have no idea who that person is. Researchers say this struggle to read other faces is common. This week ...
05.13.2019 What's Not On The Test Smarts matter. But other factors may play an even bigger role in whether someone succeeds. This week, we speak with Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman about the skills that predict how you'll fare in life. We'll also look at programs ...
05.06.2019 Creating God If you've taken part in a religious service, have you ever stopped to think about how it all came to be? How did people become believers? Where did the rituals come from? And what purpose does it all serve? This ...
04.29.2019 A Dramatic Cure Placebos belong in clinical trials, not in the doctor's office. That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. This week, we ask what placebos might teach us about healing.
04.22.2019 Why No One Feels Rich If you've ever flown in economy class on a plane, you probably had to walk through the first class cabin to get to your seat. Maybe you noticed the extra leg room. The freshly-poured champagne. Maybe you were annoyed, or ...

Older episodes

Hidden Brain

What's Hidden Brain about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Hidden Brain episodes:

Close Enough: Living Through Others

An Unfinished Lesson

Panic In The Street

The Bomb That Didn't Explode

The Tale of the Cowboy Philosopher

The Influence You Have

Liar, Liar, Liar

Passion Isn't Enough

When Things Click

Secret Friends

Warnings, Warnings Everywhere

Emotional Currency

On The Knife's Edge

Creatures Of Habit

Why We Love Surprises

Did That Really Happen?

Zipcode Destiny

In The Heat Of The Moment

Counting Other People's Blessings

The Ventilator

Hungry, Hungry Hippocampus

The Talk Market

BS Jobs

The Monkey Marketplace

The Lonely American Man

Screaming Into The Void

Baby Talk

We're All Gonna Live Forever!

We're All Gonna Die!

You Can't Hit Unsend

You 2.0: Decide Already!

You 2.0: Deep Work

You 2.0: Rebel With A Cause

You 2.0: Our Better Nature

You 2.0: Tunnel Vision

You 2.0: The Empathy Gym

Facts Aren't Enough

Finding Your Voice

The Fox And The Hedgehog

I Buy, Therefore I Am

The Lazarus Drug

Our Animal Instincts

Me, Myself, and IKEA

People Like Us

More Divided Than Ever?

Losing Face

What's Not On The Test

Creating God

A Dramatic Cure

Why No One Feels Rich

Other shows like Hidden Brain: