Hidden Brain

How to Make a Difference: Part 2

Think about the last time you had a discouraging thought. Maybe you told yourself, "This won't work. I'm not cut out for this." Did you take that thought as fact?

Hidden Brain

The Things We Don't Say

We assume that other people know how we feel about them. But study after study finds that we are much worse at conveying our feelings than we think. The gap between what we feel and what others actually perceive is often enormous.

Fresh Air

Riz Ahmed takes on his inner critic

We all feel that we have to perform this version of ourselves that knows the script, that, as you said, is commanding and decisive and desirable, the best public version of ourselves. We're performing that. But actually the gap between that public self and the messy vulnerability of our private selves is often huge.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us go through life thinking of ourselves as ordinary. We assume that our experiences, our feelings, our struggles are common — that what happens to us happens to everyone. But this assumption, however comforting, may be costing us dearly.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us can point to experiences that made us who we are — a teacher who believed in us, a parent who didn't, a move to a new city that forced us to reinvent ourselves. But psychologists have found that we dramatically underestimate how much we will change in the future, even as we readily acknowledge how much we've changed in the past.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us feel we have an ordinary life. We are not famous, we have not discovered a cure for cancer or written a great novel. But the psychologist Brian Little argues this view is mistaken. Our lives are filled with what he calls 'personal projects' — the goals and pursuits that animate us and give meaning to our existence.

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 intuitively feel that our inner experiences are beyond the reach of others. But psychologists have found that when we actually test this idea, our emotions, thoughts, and feelings are often far more transparent to others than we imagine — and that other people's inner lives are far more similar to our own than we tend to assume.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us know that we're biased when it comes to our own performance — we tend to think we're better than we actually are. But here's the strange part: this bias doesn't just affect how we see ourselves. It also affects how we see other people. When we watch someone else do something, we unconsciously compare them to ourselves — and since we think we're pretty good, we use ourselves as the benchmark.

Fresh Air

Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond

I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.

Book of the Day

In 'Names Have Been Changed,' a criminal on the run confesses her story on a podcast

The more time passes, the more she really just wants someone to kind of acknowledge her real name. I think in one of the first few things she tells us in the book is, "I just wish someone would call me by my real name." It's been about 10 years that she's been on the run. And so, it's almost like she's lost sight of herself in that process of hurtling forward, you know, around the globe.

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.

Fresh Air

Riz Ahmed is chasing acceptance in 'Bait'

There's a lot of me and Shah, but I think actually there's a lot of Shah in all of us, more than we like to admit. And really the show is about this feeling that life sometimes feels like one big audition.

Fresh Air

Jamilah Lemieux on the complicated beauty of being a ‘Black. Single. Mother.’

I was afraid that if I wrote that book, I was going to be a black single mother for the rest of my life. But also, as I wrote this book, I realized there's nothing wrong if I am a black single mother for life. I've lived a great life as a black single mother. It may not be my preference, but it's not a death sentence, it's not doom.