HIDDEN BRAINHOSTED BYHIDDEN BRAIN, SHANKAR VEDANTAM
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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Hidden Brain
Parents: Keep Out!
Mon Apr 22 2024
With the boards. There's, see, there's hammer and nails here, and then he proceeded to take the boards and to start showing the children how to pound with hammer and nails. And what I observed is the children suddenly changed from really very happy and playful to quite bored as they watched their father show them how to pound nails into boards. There was another time, Peter, when a 6th grade teacher told you about a game that her students had invented during the COVID pandemic, what was this game? She was feeling very bad for her 6th graders. They're still children, really. You know, they're 11 12 years old at most, and they're they're indoors all the school day. They don't have any recess at all. So she, thought, well, wouldn't it be nice if I at least gave them a half an hour to play before school starts? Some of them arrived early anyway, and, turns out they arrived eagerly early when she provided that play opportunity. So she let them play in the ways that they wanted to play. And one of the games that they played, this was after COVID, was, called something like infection or maybe it was called COVID, something like that. And some of the children were infection. And, if they touch somebody, you became infected and, might die. And others were called vaccine, and they could prevent you from dying by coming and touching you. It was quite an imaginative game. I have no idea how they developed, but the teacher said they were clearly having a lot of fun with that. But then, one of the school administrators observed that, and she said, no. We can't have games like that going on. We can't have people pretending to die. I've heard of many stories where recesses have been very much curtailed and limited because of rules about what you can and cannot do in play. Peter noticed something.
Hidden Brain
The Curious Science of Cravings
Mon Apr 15 2024
This is hidden brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the 4th century, a young man named Aurelius Augustineis, found himself in a struggle with himself. He was born in what is today Algeria, but at that time was part of the Roman Empire. O'rili has found himself torn between the dictates of his faith and the impulses of his own body. I was bound down by this disease of the flesh he wrote. It's deadly pleasures were a chain that I dragged along with me. Aurelius was infatuated with his lover. He felt his attraction to her was purely physical, and this felt wrong to him. Aurelius happened to be one of the most prolific writers of his time, so we have a detailed picture of his mind from his various books and writings. At one point, he said, I was a prisoner of habit, suffering cruel torment through trying to satisfy a lust that could never be sated. Aurelius, whom devout Catholics know today as Saint Augustine, is said to have prayed for divine assistance to battle his cravings. But his appeal to god revealed his own divided self. Lord give me chastity and Continents, he prayed. Only not yet. For thousands of years, human beings have tried different techniques to get control over their desires and cravings. These battles have made their way into myths and legends. In the Odyssey, the famous epic by the Greek poet Homer, the warrior Odysseus, orders his men to bind him to the mast of his own ship, so he cannot succumb to the temptations of the beautiful human like creature known as the sirens. In modern times, The diet industry has offered thousands of books and videos to help people get control over their food cravings.
Hidden Brain
What Is Normal?
Mon Apr 08 2024
With the eugenics movement. Since biology makes us who we are, shouldn't biology determine who should marry whom, who should and shouldn't be having children and which babies were worth saving? A counterrevolution to these ideas erupted in the 20th century. A new wave of scholars challenged the notion that some groups were biologically superior to others. Leading this charge was a Pennsylvania born anthropologist named Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead, I mean, she probably is the most well known anthropologist that has ever lived. She was an iconic figure in the 20th century. Tom Pearson is an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin Stout, an author of a book about Margaret Mead. She kind of became quite publicly well known early on in her career based on her research in Samoa in the 19 twenties, 19 thirties, which was focused on the sexual lives of young girls. In her fieldwork, Margaret Mead followed the standard anthropological approach of drawing differences between people in the US and people in Samoa. She described the rituals of the Samoan people, their approaches to child rearing, their sexual practices. But unlike others, Mead concluded that the differences she saw were neither innate nor shaped by biology. They were the creations of culture, upbringing, and social norms. The beliefs and practices of American adolescents were not superior to those of Samoan adolescents. They were just different. This was in the context of the early 20th century eugenics movement, where there was a new era of anthropologists who were questioning a lot of the ideas that surrounded eugenics and that, there are these sort of innate characteristics that
Hidden Brain
The Transformative Ideas of Daniel Kahneman
Mon Apr 01 2024
Slow and transformative, this week on Hidden Brain. If you've ever taken an econ 101 class, you were probably taught what's long been a core idea in economics. People are rational. They seek out the best information. They measure costs and benefits and maximize pleasure and profit. This idea of the rational economic actor has been around for centuries. But about 50 years ago, 2 obscure psychologists shattered these foundational assumptions. The psychologists showed that people routinely walk away from good money. And they explained why once people get in a hole, they often keep digging. The methods of these psychologists were as unusual as their insights. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent hours together talking. They came up with playful thought experiments. As Daniel Kahneman remembered it, they laughed a lot. We found our own mistakes very funny. What was fun was finding yourself about to say something really stupid. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who passed away in 1996, transformed the way we understand the mind. And that transformation had philosophical implications. The stories about the past are so good that they create an illusion that life is understandable. And that's an illusion. And that they create the illusion that you can predict the future, and that's an illusion. Life may not, as Danny says, be understandable, at least not fully. But that didn't stop me from asking him to reflect on his own journey.
Hidden Brain
Are You Listening?
Mon Mar 25 2024
Wasn't you'd felt that you weren't being welcomed into the group. And in in this case, you were you wanted to be part of this grand proposal, and this person was rejecting you. And as human beings, I I think we're extraordinarily sensitive to any signal that someone actually might be dissing us, ignoring us, rejecting us. Of course. It's a basic human need. The need to belong, the need to feel included, and and to be connected with other people is, it it goes with us through early childhood to our entire life. Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering, do you see examples of poor listening, as you look around you, not just in your own life, Guy, but when you look at the media, on on cable TV, faculty meetings, cabinet meetings? You know, do do you see examples of poor listening everywhere you look? Well, to remind you, I live in Israel, so I see more example of poor listening than than than the other way around. Yeah. There is a sentence saying, 2 Israelis, 4 opinions. So, unfortunately, I see poor listening everywhere, and, even more unfortunately, it seems to be escalating as time goes by. Nowadays, with the televisions, at least in Israel, this is how I feel. So, you the norm, unfortunately, became, to bring someone and start arguing with them. So if you don't argue with them, it's not interesting. All about the arguing and the yelling and who yells stronger and who's who dominates the conversation. And 2 people yell. So the one that you hear is the person who yells the loudest. Mhmm. This is what they talk about, a toxic atmosphere. It's always like, let's bring someone from the opposite that we disagree with and see, and and get them start yelling, and then we we'll respond. And as a listening researcher, this really I