Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have a lot of awe in their lives tend to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. And that sense of being part of something larger — whether it's a religion, a community, or the natural world — seems to be deeply connected to well-being.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have these experiences feel that they've encountered a reality that's even more real than the things we see and touch in everyday life. And what's especially interesting is that these experiences also appear to change people. They feel a greater sense of connection with others. They feel less fear about death.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences — that sense of oneness, of feeling connected to something larger than themselves — tend to have a thicker cortex in certain brain regions. And this is true even after you control for whether someone goes to church or synagogue or mosque, or whether they believe in God.

TED

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

The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying. OK, let's go back to that elephant in the room. Social media and smartphones also increased during this period. But here's the weird thing. In our longitudinal studies, social media does not emerge as a major predictor of teen mental health.

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 more of these experiences feel a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They feel more connected to other people, even strangers. They're less afraid of death. They're more likely to change their behavior in positive ways. And they report feeling a sense of awe or wonder at the world around them.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences also tend to be happier, have better mental health, and find more meaning in their lives. And this is true regardless of whether they belong to a formal religious tradition — even people who don't consider themselves religious seem to benefit from these kinds of experiences.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences also tend to be healthier and happier. They show lower rates of depression and anxiety, less substance abuse, and they even tend to live longer. And it's not just that healthy, happy people have more time to go to church or temple — the spiritual experiences themselves seem to be driving these positive outcomes.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier. They have lower rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. They even live longer.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier than those who do not. But psychologist Lisa Miller has found something even more surprising: the brains of spiritual people are actually structurally different from those who are not spiritual.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences also tend to have better mental health. They have lower rates of depression and anxiety. They're less likely to die by suicide. They're less likely to abuse substances. They show greater well-being and life satisfaction.

Freakonomics Radio

680. Can Universities Win Back Our Trust?

Dartmouth president Sian Beilock, a psychologist by training, made her name studying why people choke. Now she's applying those insights to one of the most scrutinized jobs in America.

Fresh Air

Steven Spielberg

I think that when I saw that movie for the first time, and I had a Lionel electric train set, and by actually crashing the train into things and watching the train derail and watching the passenger cars and a couple of boxcars and a caboose pile up, I was able to, I think intuitively, wrest back control of my fear. And I really think it helped assuage the fear. It helped me get in total control over it. So I was the one causing something that was going to maybe have a chance to scare other people but no longer myself.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences also tend to report greater psychological well-being. They have higher life satisfaction, more positive emotions, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. In some ways, this makes perfect sense — feeling connected to something larger than yourself, believing that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, these things might naturally make you happier.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier. They report lower rates of depression and anxiety. They are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, less likely to be involved in domestic violence, and less likely to develop dementia in old age.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

Psychologist Lisa Miller says our brains also crave something else: transcendence. She suggests that spirituality is a universal human capacity, and that feeling connected to something larger than ourselves may be essential to a fulfilling life.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who report a lot of awe in their lives also tend to score high on measures of well-being. They report feeling more connected to others, more curious, and less focused on their own day-to-day concerns. In a sense, awe seems to shrink the self — and in doing so, it might make room for something larger.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most people think of music as something you listen to alone or share with people you already know. But research suggests that music can also be a bridge to strangers — that the experience of moving and making sound together can create feelings of connection and trust, even among people who have never met.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of laughter as a response to something funny. But researcher Robert Provine found that laughter is less about humor than it is about social connection — we are 30 times more likely to laugh when we are with other people than when we are alone.

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.

Book of the Day

In 'The Jellyfish Problem,' an introverted scientist is called in to help an island

What I loved about jellyfish is they kind of resist all efforts to see ourselves in them. You look at a jellyfish and have to ask yourself, "Where is its mouth? Where are its eyes?" And I think that makes something a very good candidate for a monster, because what is a monster if something that we can't relate to and can't see ourselves in at all.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most people think of listening as a passive activity — something we do while waiting for our turn to speak. But research suggests that feeling truly heard by another person is one of the most powerful experiences we can have. It can change how we think, how we feel about ourselves, and how we relate to others.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of laughter as a response to something funny. But researchers who study laughter say this is backwards: we don't laugh because something is funny; we laugh to connect with other people. Laughter is less about humor and more about relationships.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

We all have moments in our lives when we see someone who could use a helping hand. We tell ourselves we should help, but then something stops us.

Hidden Brain

Who Are You, Really?

You're not the same person with your friends as you are with your co-workers or your kids. So who are you, really?

Book of the Day

'Big Fan' investigates fandom from darts and football to Taylor Swift

One of the key aspects of fandom is that we are risking a little bit of our emotional and psychological health on something over which we have no control and that there was it's a little bit of gambling in a way on our happiness and that's what makes it thrilling. It's also what makes it crushing and disappointing at times, but without that sense of powerlessness, you don't get the same roller coaster.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think that creativity is something you either have or you don't — that it's a fixed trait, like eye color. But researchers who study creativity say this belief is not only wrong, it may actually be preventing people from thinking creatively.

Radiolab

This American Roach

And, like every other time she has come into contact with a roach, this sent her into a debilitating spiral of fear, anger, and disgust.

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

For centuries, people have described creativity as something mysterious: a flash of insight, a whisper from the muse, a sudden idea that seems to arrive out of nowhere.

Hidden Brain

The Empathy Gym

Some people are good at putting themselves in another person's shoes. Others may struggle to relate. But psychologist Jamil Zaki argues that empathy isn't a fixed trait.

TBPN

SpaceX IPO Date, ChatGPT x Personal Finance, Sanders & AOC vs. Data Centers | Diet TBPN

My May 2026 approach to prompting is I've completely I've completely given up on like yelling at AI. And I'm like good now. Yeah. I do more like cognitive behavioral therapy with with AI now. Like I do more CBT. I try to like reassure the AI.

Freakonomics Radio

675. Has the New York Times Become a Games Company?

But their runaway success with games like Wordle says something bigger about the way we live now.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone...what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors.

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled

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.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us.

Pivot

The Bezos Met Ball Takeover: All the Money, None of the Rizz | Pivot

The day of the IPO, they went into a conference room, this, you know, nice, fairly unattractive guy who had no sexual currency their whole life, and they come out and they're the sexiest man alive.

Pivot

Is Trump Using the WHCD Shooting as an “Opportunity” to Push His Agenda? | Pivot

The biggest psychological tax cut in history would be if we elected a technocrat who maybe checked in once a month but wasn't in your face every day and dominating the table conversation at dinner.

It's Been a Minute

The guys behind the men’s purity movement

I think what is so different about the way specifically men of their generation, which is Gen Z, they're in their very early 20s, and my generation, which is about 10 years older than that, is that they have so much more shame around the amount of pornography they watch.

EconTalk

Adam Smith's Warning About Wealth, Fame, and Status (with Ross Levine)

Smith emerges as a penetrating psychologist who understood that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth but for respect--and that this hunger, left unexamined, leads individuals and societies alike into serious trouble.

Fresh Air

Actor Oscar Isaac is ‘a vulture’ of his own life

With Victor Frankenstein, he had no doubts. The whole movie, he has very little doubt, which was a very freeing thing to play up until the moment of creation. And then after that, it's kind of all doubt. And that's when he kind of goes in within himself and ossifies. But Josh is very different. Josh is mostly doubt and mostly reactionary.

Fresh Air

Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?

Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology. And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist. This isn't actually a problem of the black person.

Fresh Air

Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?

You can spend all your time trying to prove that we are humans, that we had a civilization, that we have art, that we have culture. But it's a distraction because there's always going to be one more thing. And actually, the problem is not us. The problem is the racist who has no other way of feeling full, no other way of having integrity other than putting someone else down.

Code Switch

How your vote became your identity

There was a time when our party was a thing that we voted for, and, you know, we felt psychologically connected to the party. The party wins, we feel good. If the party loses, we feel bad. But there's still all these other parts of our identity that we have that are linked to our, you know, sense of self-esteem and our place in the world.

It's Been a Minute

The world is awful. Is it healthier to stop caring? | It's Been A Minute

This pose of acting like you don't care and maybe the pose becomes so real that you actually don't really care.

Hidden Brain

The Debt Trap

We like to think that good financial decisions come down to discipline and basic math. But the psychology of money turns out to be deeply complicated.

Semafor

The State of Happiness in 2026 | Semafor Events

Well, I'd have to say happiness. So that's why we do this. And at that time he was doing surveys where he would ask people just tell me how your life is going.