Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have encountered the idea of the bell curve. Average is the most common outcome. Very good or very bad outcomes are rarer. Extremely good or extremely bad outcomes are rarest of all. But Yadin Dudai says our emotional memories don't follow a bell curve — instead, they skew toward the extremes.

Radiolab

Return of Alpha Gal

It made no sense: why couldn't she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades?

Book of the Day

In 'The Great Wherever' and 'Country People,' city dwellers try out rural life

There's no singular truest version of any family story. Every version comes with misremembering and projections and savory flourishes.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

We don't just want people to know us — we want to feel known by them. And one of the most powerful ways to feel known is to have someone remember the small details of our lives: the name of our dog, the fact that we hate cilantro, the thing we mentioned once about our complicated relationship with our mother.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of nostalgia as a kind of pleasant but passive experience — a wistful longing for the past. But researchers have found that nostalgia is actually a social emotion. When we feel nostalgic, we don't just think about ourselves; we think about the people we love.

Hidden Brain

Who Are You, Really?

For many of us, forgetting a name or losing your keys feels like a small failure. But what if forgetting is actually one of the most important things your brain does?

Book of the Day

New children’s books center intergenerational relationships in life and the afterlife

Music is still something that they remember, and it's something that I saw reflected in my own life, and that's sort of what drew me to write it.

Fresh Air

Comic Jeff Ross on roasting, loss and his epic bar mitzvah

I would watch the bands from a window in the kitchen. You know, I would like peek out as a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old working weekends and summers making fruit cup and salads, and, you know, I played high school football, but I had red fingernails from the cherries that I put on the fruit cups.

TED

The New Science of Eyewitness Memory | John Wixted | TED

What if the problem is not so much about how unreliable eyewitness memory is, because of how easily contamination can create false memories, and more about how and when we test the witness's memory.