When we ask the world’s oldest people a simple question — what’s your secret to longevity? — we walk away with some pretty illogical answers. In this episode we set out to see what we’ve actually learned from supercentenarians and, along the way, reveal a whole other side to our fascination with extreme longevity.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely's insights into why we do what we do have made him a best-selling author and a star TED talker. Now, he's going to help you stick with your New Year's resolution to exercise. In this episode, Ariely partners with Only Human on a new project.

We all know the cost of healthcare is staggering in this country — but is there anything you can do about it? Dr. Zeke Emanuel talks about how we can be a smarter consumers of healthcare, and the ways the system might be slowly changing to help all of us — doctors, hospitals, insurers, and patients — understand cost better.

(REBROADCAST) When we asked you to share your health confessions with us we didn’t know what to expect. Turns out you guys have all kinds of vices: you eat the wrong things, you use drugs, sometimes you lie to your doctors. And doctors are no better. In this episode, hear stories from patients — and doctors — about mistakes, mishaps, and near fatal errors.

Does a more humane hospital equal a safer one? That’s a question Johns Hopkins is grappling with — and Dr. Peter Pronovost believes the answer is yes. His Project Emerge aims to reengineer the way patients are cared for in the ICU.

Bishop Gwendolyn Phillips Coates is on a mission. She’s a preacher in a small church in South L.A., and she’s made it her job to get her congregation prepared for the end of life. Bishop Coates is trying to make conversations about death easier because she knows first hand that being prepared for the end can make living better too.

When Rose was growing up, she knew something wasn't quite right about how she heard the world. But every time she got a hearing test at the audiologist's office, she aced them. It took her years to figure out what was happening — until she met Professor Nina Kraus. What began as a quest to solve a mystery about one woman’s hearing lead to a discovery not about faulty ears, but about how all of our brains process sound.

It’s not coincidental that Only Human decided to tackle listening right before a big holiday, when a lot of us will spend time with family. Sometimes the people we love the most can be the hardest to listen to. So we’re rounding out our Listen Up project with some last-minute guidance. Writer and humorist Henry Alford offers advice from crisis negotiators, as well as some of his own strategies to keeping the peace at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

When you’re in a situation where you have to collaborate with other people, it’s easy to get stuck in a sludge of unproductivity. So we’re borrowing an exercise from the world of improv comedy, “Yes, And… ,” which is used to keep conversation flowing. Instead of shutting down the other person’s ideas with “no” or “but,” you build upon them. Molly Lloyd from the improv theatre Upright Citizens Brigade guides us through this week’s challenge — and you might be surprised where it can take you.

Memory and listening go hand-in-hand. But you know the feeling: You’re at an event where you don’t know anyone. And then you get introduced to lots of folks — only to forget their names ten minutes later. The good news? We can work on our memory. Memory champion and science journalist Joshua Foer guides us through creative ways that will help make any name stick — and reminds us effort is always key.