Hidden Brain

The Things We Don't Say

We often assume that the people around us can read between the lines — that our silence speaks for itself, or that our feelings are obvious from context. But research suggests that what feels transparent to us is often invisible to others. The gap between what we mean and what we actually communicate can be vast, and most of us have no idea how wide it truly is.

TED Intersections

How to Live a Good Life — on Earth and in Space | TED Intersections

What we owe another person is to be willing to look at them again. Which means like often times we meet people and we sort of form our assumptions and stereotypes about them. We kind of We put them in a little category in our brain and then we interact with them according to that category.

Hidden Brain

How to Be A Better Partner

our fears, desires, and insecurities can shape our perceptions of our partners — sometimes creating the very reality we expect

Hidden Brain

How to Be A Better Partner

When we look at the people we love, how clearly do we really see them? This week, we talk with psychologist Edward LeMay about how our fears, desires, and insecurities can shape our perceptions of our partners — sometimes creating the very reality we expect.

Book of the Day

Authors Annie Hartnett and Kevin Wilson on writing road trip novels | NPR's Book of the Day

I think that that's the magic of road trips in real life is how quickly you can get an impression of a place, how many weird things and weird people you encounter if you do take a cross-country road trip.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have had the experience of being in a new place and noticing things we'd never seen before — a gorgeous mural on the side of a building, a family of ducks in a pond, the way light filters through leaves. But over time, as a place becomes familiar, we stop seeing it. We go on autopilot. The same thing can happen with people.

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.

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.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation in the body — it's an experience that is profoundly shaped by the brain. The same injury can produce very different levels of pain in different people, and even in the same person at different times.

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

How to Combat Pain

Most people think of pain as a signal from the body — a warning that something is wrong. But Yoni Ashar and his colleagues found that for many people with chronic back pain, the signal had become decoupled from any actual tissue damage. The brain had learned to generate pain on its own, independent of what was happening in the body.

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 depends not just on the signals traveling from the body to the brain, but also on what the brain expects to feel. When the brain anticipates pain, it can amplify those signals — and when it doesn't, the very same injury can feel far less intense.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

When pain signals travel to the brain, the brain doesn't just passively receive that information — it actively decides how much attention to pay to it. This means that pain is not simply a readout of damage in the body; it's a construction of the mind.

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

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

When you feel pain, a signal travels from the injured part of your body up through your nervous system. But the brain decides how much attention to pay to that signal. If the brain is occupied elsewhere — by a competing task or distraction — it can turn down the volume on pain.

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 sensation — it's an experience. And that experience is profoundly shaped by what we believe about our pain, what we think is causing it, and how we feel about it emotionally.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain feels like a simple message from the body. If your elbow hurts, there must be something wrong with your elbow. If your back is painfully stiff, you need some work done on your back. But psychologist Rachel Zoffness says our minds play a much larger role in our experience of pain than many of us realize.

Fresh Air

Harriet Clark spent 37 years visiting her mom in prison

I think fundamentally the prison looked to me like a hill. It's hard for me to remember what the prison looked like to me as a child because I went there for almost 40 years and it changed a lot in that 40 years. It became much more prison-like.

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 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

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have these experiences — near-death experiences, or experiences of awe, or spiritual experiences generally — often come away feeling that they have encountered something that is more real than ordinary reality. And this sense of 'hyper-reality' is one of the most commonly reported features of these experiences.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have what researchers call 'spiritual experiences' — states of overwhelming connection, awe, or transcendence — consistently show changes in a specific region of the brain called the parietal cortex. What's surprising is that damage to this region, whether from a stroke or a tumor, can actually cause people to become more spiritual, not less.

The New York Times

Why A Supreme Court Ruling Could Separate This Mother and Her Son

It hurts deeply to know that just six years ago, I was a hero. Now I am considered a burden to this country.

TED

The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED

Chemical complexity in the glass does not necessarily equal perceived complexity when people are rating the wine.

TED

The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED

There are actually two ways of thinking about complexity when it comes to wine or food. There's, first, chemical complexity, right? That's the stuff that's in the glass. What are the chemical molecules in the wine? And then there's a concept called psychological complexity, where complexity is not really in the wine, but it's in the mind of the drinker.

TED

Why AI Is Unlikely to Become Conscious | Anil Seth | TED

We project consciousness into them in the same way we might project faces into clouds, or even the image of Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.

Radiolab

Forests on Forests

It didn't take long for them to realize not only was the forest canopy not empty, it was absolutely filled to the brim with life.

How to Be a Better Human

How to Confront Your Inner Critic (W/ Anu Gupta) | How to Be a Better Human | TED

I realized people aren't seeing me. people are seeing ideas of me and it was those ideas that kept me depressed and paranoid all these years and I realized I wasn't alone. I don't want to live in a world where we live in ideas of one another. I want to live in a world where we live in the presence of one another, the real people.

Hidden Brain

Group Think

our group loyalties affect us more than we realize, and can even shape our basic senses of sight, taste and smell

Book of the Day

In the novel ‘Black Bag,’ a classroom experiment invites questions about masculinity

We often regard people as black bags, don't we? Filling in the blanks for suppositions we make without really knowing

Hidden Brain

Group Think

how our group loyalties affect us more than we realize, and can even shape our basic senses of sight, taste and smell

TED Radio Hour

How does your brain perceive the world?

It puts us into confrontation with the fact that two minds can perceive the same reality entirely differently.

Mixed Signals

Gavin Newsom on 'Sick' FCC Threats, David Ellison, & Getting Trump's Personal Cell Phone Number

It's not what is said now, it's not it's what's not said. It's what's not reported and it's happening.

It's Been a Minute

Is tech making us too obsessed with our bodies? | It's Been A Minute

Even if you're not paying attention to how your body is feeling, you're paying attention to those metrics.

Book of the Day

To understand consciousness, Michael Pollan looked at plants, AI and himself

Sensience is kind of the base default case of having a certain awareness of your environment and a sense of the changes taking place in your environment and whether they're good for you or bad for you and then the ability to move toward the positive and away from the negative. Consciousness is kind of how we do sensience.