Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a signal of damage — it is also a prediction. The brain is constantly trying to figure out what is happening in the body, and sometimes it gets it wrong, generating pain even when there is no ongoing tissue damage.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think the thing that I've always believed most deeply is that intelligence is the meta-resource. If you have intelligence, you can figure out how to get all of the other resources. And if you can massively increase the amount of intelligence working on the world's problems, you can unlock solutions that we can't even currently imagine.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us think of our brains as recorders of experience — cameras that capture life as it is. But the brain is less like a camera and more like an editor, constantly making choices about what to include and what to cut. It doesn't just record what happens to us; it constructs a version of reality shaped by our expectations, our desires, and our fears.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation. And for most of human history, we've had a very fixed amount of each. But if we can take the cap off of intelligence — if we can have, you know, billions of agents running around solving problems — the potential upside here is just staggering.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is a lot like an alarm system. It's designed to get your attention, to make you do something. And if the alarm never turns off, that's exhausting — it wears you down. But here's the key insight: the alarm isn't the injury. The alarm is your brain's interpretation of signals from your body, and that interpretation can change.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us recognize that we're shaped by our upbringing and our culture. But researchers who study self-awareness say there's something even more fundamental at work: our failure to realize how different we are from other people. We think everyone sees the world the way we do — that our reactions, our values, our fears, and our hopes are simply the normal human response to life.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on most traits — but the more traits you consider, the more each of us diverges into a unique combination that has never existed before and will never exist again. When you consider the totality of who you are, you are not ordinary.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have been taught to think about luck as something fleeting — a good parking spot, or finding a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. But psychologists who study this topic say that some people are consistently luckier than others, and that luck is less about chance than it is about how you move through the world.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have been taught to think about luck as a minor factor in success — just a small boost that helps certain people get ahead. But psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman says this view misses something profound: many of the things we consider to be signs of talent or hard work are themselves the product of circumstances beyond our control.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us intuitively feel that we are above average in a variety of ways. We think we're smarter than average, more competent than average, more ethical than average. Psychologists have documented that people's assessments of themselves are, to put it charitably, often not well-calibrated.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain researchers have found that the experience of pain is heavily shaped by context, expectation, and meaning. The same injury can feel devastating in one situation and barely noticeable in another — soldiers wounded in battle, for instance, often report feeling little pain at the moment of injury, because the wound means they will be evacuated from the front lines.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation but an emotion, something produced by the brain in response to a complex set of inputs. And because pain is constructed by the brain, our mental states can shape and even control how much pain we experience.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a signal from the body — it's an experience constructed by the brain. And that means our thoughts, emotions, and expectations can powerfully shape how much pain we feel. In some cases, simply understanding that pain is not always a reliable indicator of tissue damage can itself reduce suffering.

TED

The Case for Making Art in a Crisis | Yiyun Kang | TED

We can feel a paper cut, but we cannot feel a collapsing planet. We're drowning in information but starving for meaning. The chain of understanding is broken, leaving our crisis so cold and abstract.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

The problem is that we think of pain as something that just happens to us — a signal from the body that something is wrong. But the truth is more interesting. The brain is constantly making predictions about what it expects to feel, and those predictions shape what we actually experience.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Physicians themselves have had to grapple with the nature of pain. For much of medical history, pain was seen as a symptom — a signal from the body that something had gone wrong. But researchers have come to see that pain is more than a warning system. It is, in some ways, a construction of the mind.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a signal from damaged tissue — it's also a prediction. The brain is constantly trying to anticipate what's going to happen next, and pain is part of that predictive process. This means that pain can exist even in the absence of injury, and injury can exist without pain.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation — it's also a psychological experience. And that means that the way we think about pain, the way we attend to it, the way we catastrophize about it or don't, can have a huge effect on how much we suffer.

TED

The Case for Making Art in a Crisis | Yiyun Kang | TED

We can feel a paper cut, but we cannot feel a collapsing planet. We have more data than any generation in history, yet reality feels further away. We're drowning in information but starving for meaning.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We often think of prejudice as a moral failing — a character flaw in people who are just bad actors. But research suggests that's not the whole story. Our minds rely on mental maps — generalizations about the world — that can lead us to make assumptions about people based on group membership, even when we genuinely believe we treat everyone as individuals.

TED

Life Lessons from the DJ Booth | ELEW | TED

My mantra is: my mind is the club, I am the DJ [and] my choices affect the atmosphere -- so let's keep that atmosphere groovy.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most of us assume that our perception of the world is accurate — that we see things as they really are. But our brains are not cameras. They are prediction machines, constantly generating models of reality based on past experience, and then updating those models when new information arrives.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We all have mental maps — representations of how we see ourselves and the world. But the amazing thing is, many of us use mental maps that were drawn up a long time ago, in a completely different context. And we continue to use them, even when the world changes, and even when we change.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most of us recognize that we don't always act in our own best interests. We procrastinate. We reach for the candy bar instead of the apple. We say things we later regret. Psychologists have long recognized that our behavior is shaped by mental maps — internal representations of the world that guide our actions, often without our awareness.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We don't see the world as it is. We see the world through mental maps that we've constructed over a lifetime of experience. And the problem with mental maps is that they can become outdated — they can lead us astray in a world that has changed, or in situations that are different from those in which the maps were formed.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most of us know that stereotypes are wrong, but we may not fully appreciate how deeply those stereotypes shape our interactions with people every day. Psychologists have a term for this. They call it a mental map — an internal model of the world that guides how we navigate our relationships and institutions.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most people assume that if you change your mind about something — if you update your beliefs — you've essentially gotten rid of the old belief and replaced it with a new one. But that's not how the mind works. The old belief doesn't disappear; it gets inhibited, suppressed. And when you're under stress, or tired, or distracted, that inhibition can fail, and the old belief comes roaring back.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The vast majority of the best investors who I've ever met, they have some sort of an edge, right? And when you think about that edge, it usually comes from a very specific life experience or a very specific type of intellectual curiosity that they've developed over decades. And that is very hard to replicate.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

our brains actually navigate the world by coming up with mental maps. These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The thing that makes a great investor is this idea that they're able to hold conflicting ideas simultaneously. They can be a bull and a bear on the same company. They can be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. And they're able to weigh those things and come to a conclusion that they can act on.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

When we think about making changes in our lives, we typically focus on behaviors. But often, the more powerful lever is the mental map we're using to navigate the world. If the map is wrong, no amount of effort will get us to our destination.

Freakonomics Radio

How a Great Architect Thinks, with Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person

Is the oxymoron really "the secret sauce to everything"? That's the case Ingels makes in this debut episode of our new video show Better in Person, filmed in Stephen Dubner's living room.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We often think of our beliefs and mental models as reflections of reality — accurate maps of the world that help us navigate our lives. But what happens when the map is wrong? What happens when the map itself is the problem?

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We all walk around with mental maps of how the world works — maps that tell us what's safe and what's dangerous, what's possible and what's not. The problem is that these maps were often drawn a long time ago, in circumstances that no longer exist. And we keep using old maps to navigate new terrain.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

Life Kit

To be or not to be a parent

The word decide comes from a Latin root meaning to cut away from. So every decision involves loss. So what I say is don't ask will I regret my decision. Ask which decision will I regret least.

TED

Why a Social Media Ban Won’t Save Teens | Candice Odgers | TED

People ask me all the time: what could have happened during this period other than social media coming online? The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about building a company as, 'I have a product, now I need to go get customers.' Kareem inverts this. He thinks about it as, 'I need to understand a customer so deeply that the product becomes obvious.' The rarest companies are built by people who develop such a profound understanding of a specific human problem that they can't help but solve it.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The real insight is that the S-curve is not just a technology adoption curve — it's also a valuation curve. The multiples that investors are willing to pay expand dramatically as a technology moves from the early adopters to the early majority, and then compress just as dramatically as growth slows and the technology matures.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The market will actually tell you when you're wrong. There are a lot of investors who get seduced by a theme and they just hold on forever, waiting for the theme to play out. But the stock market is actually a very efficient discounting mechanism, and if the theme isn't playing out, the stocks will tell you.

Hidden Brain

Stepping Out of the Shadows

Why does one bad experience have the power to overshadow an otherwise good day? Psychologist Alison Ledgerwood explores the negativity bias, the deeply human tendency to hold on to what went wrong and overlook what went right.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

The thing that's really changed for me is I used to think that the most important thing was finding the right answer. And what I now believe is the most important thing is creating the conditions for truth to emerge. Because if you create the conditions for truth to emerge, the right answer will find you.

TED

Why I Love My Bad Days | Alexi Pappas | TED

The rule of thirds is that when you're chasing a dream or doing anything hard, you're supposed to feel good a third of the time, OK a third of the time and crappy a third of the time. If you're within this ratio, then the bad days aren't bad. They just mean you're chasing a dream.

TED Radio Hour

Sports psychology for everyday life

the more open you can be to be completely devastated by something, the more possibility opens up to you. And I think that that's true in life. I think that's true in love. I know that that's true in sport.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

We assume that the people we talk to notice and think about us more than they actually do. And we assume that we know what other people are thinking and feeling — that we can read their minds. But we are often wrong about this.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The mistake most investors make is they think of S-curves as a single curve, but the reality is that most important technologies are actually a series of S-curves stacked on top of each other, and the transition periods between those S-curves are where most of the value is created and most of the mistakes are made.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The danger in technology investing is that S-curves nest inside S-curves. You can be right about the ultimate destination and completely wrong about the timing, and if you're wrong about the timing in a leveraged way, you don't get to be right about the destination.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The other thing that's really important in this world is that the flywheels tend to be self-reinforcing in a way that creates winner-take-most dynamics. The best models attract the most users, which generates the most data, which trains the best next models. And so you end up with a situation where the leaders tend to pull away from the pack over time rather than revert to the mean.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The thing that I've learned over time is that the most important question is not 'is this technology real?' but rather 'what is the rate of improvement, and how does that rate of improvement compare to what the market is pricing in?' Because technologies that are real can still be terrible investments if the market has already priced in a lot of the improvement.