In the fall of 2015, Shankar Vedantam and his colleagues at NPR launched a new weekly show called Hidden Brain – a show exploring human behavior. KRCU began airing Hidden Brain in 2017. Dan Woods had an opportunity to talk with host Shankar Vedantam to reflect on 10 years of Hidden Brain.
**Hidden Brain airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 1 p.m. on KRCU.**
Woods: Well, it has to be pretty exciting for you, 10 years of Hidden Brain. What a milestone.
Vedantam: It is. It also feels like it's a long time. We've come out with a new episode every Monday for 10 years, and that feels like both an achievement, as well as it makes me feel really old.
Woods: What sparked your interest to start Hidden Brain in the beginning?
Vedantam: So, the Hidden Brain podcast grew out of a book that I wrote that was also called The Hidden Brain. It was published in 2010, and the book explored the many ways in which we are influenced by factors that lie outside of our conscious awareness. At the time I wrote the book, I hadn't quite thought of it as being an audio product, a radio show, or a podcast. But I moved to NPR in 2011, and shortly thereafter, in 2015, we started the podcast, and it's turned out that audio, in some ways, is almost a better vehicle than print to tell the story of the hidden brain.
Woods: What are some key takeaways, at least in your mind, from this first decade, things that have really jumped out to you?
Vedantam: I think the central idea of the show is that as we go through our lifestyle, we all feel like we're aware of what's happening inside our heads. As I sit here talking to you, I feel like I know what's happening inside my mind. It turns out this is a very powerful illusion, that much of what happens inside our minds, in fact, is hidden from us. We are not aware of it and that idea manifests itself in so many different dimensions of our lives. The careers we choose, the romantic partners we get involved with, the presidential candidates we vote for, what we order at a restaurant for a meal, the color of the walls that we like. It influences so many different things about our lives. And I think that idea has been a recurring motif in the last 10 years of episodes that we've explored in different ways, ways in which our hidden brains basically are influencing our behavior.
Woods: So, are these things cooked into us at an early age? Does our environment sort of help in building this architecture, I guess, in our brains for us?
Vedantam: It's a good question, and the answer is partly yes, but partly no. The analogy that I like to use is if you've been to a play, we've all seen what a play is like. You know, there's a bunch of action happening on a stage. There are actors with lines on the stage. But we also note that in order for what's happening on the stage to happen, a whole bunch of things needs to be happening backstage in order for the action of the stage to happen.
It turns out our brains are exactly the same for what we perceive as our conscious brains. It turns out there's a whole armada of things that's happening behind the scenes that's required. Now, some of those things, in fact, are baked in from birth. You, for example, really have no understanding of how, as I'm talking with you, how is it your eardrums are producing vibrations that are sent up to your brain, which then somehow converts them into words and sentences and meaning? You really have no idea how that's happening. You just know that as I'm talking, you're understanding what I'm what I'm saying. And so there are parts of the brain that are permanently sealed off from introspection. No amount of thinking can show you how your brain is doing that.
And there are some elements of the brain that very much are the product of our environments. So, for example, we've all learned to ride a bike at one point in our lives. And when we were learning to ride a bike, it took a lot of effort, a lot of conscious effort to stay balanced on the bike. But once you've ridden a bike for a few months, you forget about riding a bike. And in fact, now if somebody asks you, how are you riding a bike? How do you stay balanced? How do you climb down a set of stairs? How do you walk? These basic things that we do all the time have become so automatic to us that they've moved outside the domain of the conscious brain into the hidden brain. And so, there are things that come from the culture, from our environment, and there are things that are hardwired into the brain.
Woods: So amazing. So, this is going to be probably a tough one, but of all the guests and all the topics over the past decade, what are some that you still think about, and they're still kind of just ruminating on that are just so fascinating to you personally?
Vedantam: I think there have been a number of those episodes, Dan. I think that over the years, there have been a number of episodes that have spoken to me. I feel like we sometimes rebroadcast episodes and bring them back, and I find that when I listen to them the second time, I take away almost as much as I took away from them the first time. And partly, I think, it's because some of the ideas that we talk about in the Hidden Brain, they are basically speaking to concerns or questions that are animating all our lives.
So, for example, if you talk about the idea of communication, for example, how we can become better communicators? It's not as if you have to learn that once, and then you don't have to think about that the rest of your life.
Being a good communicator is something that you have to work on today, next week, next month, 20 years from now. And so, ideas like that, I think, are really resonant with me because they show me how much, even when we know something, is the right thing to do. It's sometimes it's hard to do it.
So, for example, one of the central ideas in good communication is to ask how our ideas are landing with the person who is listening to the ideas. One of the guests that I had on the show some time ago gave me a wonderful analogy. You know, he said, if you're selling a used car and somebody comes to look at your car, you don't tell them all the things you're going to do with the money once they give you the money, but the nice vacation and the restaurants you're going to go to. You understand that what you have to do is talk about why the car would be of benefit to them, why it makes sense for them to buy the car. And exactly the same way as we talk to people in our daily communication, we're often so focused on our points of view, what's in it for us that we forget, that the whole point of communication is to speak in a language that the other person can understand. That's a perennially interesting idea to me.
Woods: Well, and they say, if you want to get somebody engaged, ask them about something they're interested in or something they've done because they're going to open up and talk about it.
Vedantam: Exactly. We're all interested in our own lives, and people who evidence an interest in us are precisely the people who come across as charismatic.
Woods: Are there any guests that you would love to have back that you felt like we could have gone for another hour or two that if you could just keep them talking, there was more that you wanted to pull from their from their knowledge?
Vedantam: In some ways, that's true for many of the guests that we have on the show.
We had a researcher from Stanford University named Anna Lembke a couple of years ago, and she studies addiction. But addiction more broadly written than just people who are addicted to, let's say, nicotine or to a drug of abuse, she was looking at how the brain operates in general.
And one of the things she's pointing out is that, you know, the brain has sort of a self balancing system. And so when you press too much down on one side of the brain, let's say you're very, very happy about something, you're ecstatic about something. The brain recognizes that it's not a good thing for you to permanently be in this state of ecstasy. And so, the brain has an internal leverage system that presses down on the opposite side. And so, in other words, it prevents us from getting too sad or too happy, too excited, or too bored.
And you'll find this true about yourself, that when you've been through a period of, you know, great happiness, perhaps your brain then finds some way to level off. If you've been through a period of great sadness. You know, maybe you've lost someone you love after a couple of weeks, your brain finds a way to recalibrate. So the brain is constantly trying to come back to equilibrium.
And many forms of addiction come about because we are pressing so hard on the side of the seesaw that's the pleasure side of the equation, and the brain then tries to compensate to keep us in equilibrium and starts pressing down on the pain side of the seesaw. And so even as we are seeking more and more pleasure in our lives, the brain is compensating by producing more unhappiness in our lives.
And you can see, therefore, why addiction to a drug or, you know, nicotine or to alcohol. In the long run, these are not going to be good things for us.
Woods: How much do we not know about the brain, Shankar?
Vedantam That's a fantastic question, and I would say this is one of the reasons I have loved covering and writing and thinking about the brain, because I think we actually don't know most of how our brains work. I think we have a very good sense about some things, but there are just fundamental questions that we really don't know.
You know, how is it that a thought forms in our heads? You know, as I'm talking to you right now, ideas are coming up in my mind, but almost seemingly without effort, my mouth is moving and producing those ideas as words and sentences. How does the brain do that? Why do we sleep at night? You know, what is, how do we have form intimate relationships with other people? What's happening inside our heads as we fall in love or fall out of love? These basic questions that affect us all the time in many ways continue to be mysteries at a very fundamental neurological level.
Woods: Well, Shankar, all of us here at the station wish you congratulations on 10 years, and we're looking forward to many more episodes of Hidden Brain on KRCU.
Vedantam: Thank you so much for having me on, Dan. It's been a pleasure.
