Hidden Brain

Exploring the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior | Team: Host and Executive Editor Shankar Vedantam & Executive Producer @taranoelleboyle

[Hidden Brain @HiddenBrain]

New to Hidden Brain? Here's a great place to start. https://t.co/eOBF1ShjDE

[Hidden Brain @HiddenBrain]

He had told himself that working harder was how you take care of the people you love.

But some problems don't bend to more hours or less sleep. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is to stop pushing, and just be there.

[Hidden Brain @HiddenBrain]

A father was so focused on achievement that he had trained himself to work seventy-five-hour weeks and run on three or four hours of sleep.

He was sure he was doing it all for his family.

Then he overheard his three-year-old ask a question that stopped him cold. 🧵

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And something broke open in him.

When he was his son's age, his own father was already dead. Now he was the father. And to his son, he was gone too. Not dead. Just always asleep in the chair.

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Here’s the surprising part. The hostility aimed at her was what created the loyalty. The more the hecklers treated her like the enemy, the more she wanted to fight for her date's team.

When a group casts you as the problem, you may find yourself defending a team you never chose.

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Then the crowd turned on her. They said ugly things about her mother, and sneered about how low her SAT scores must have been. She took it for a few minutes. Then she snapped.

Soon she was leaning into a stranger's face, ready to brawl for a team she had never cared about.

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As the game got tight, the friendly heckling turned mean. Her date fired back, and she could feel a fight brewing.

So she tried to cool things off. She grabbed his cap and put it on her own head, telling herself it was harmless since she didn't care about either team.

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You’d never get sucked into a fight that wasn’t yours, over a group you didn’t belong to, right?

But it can happen in minutes.

Here's how it happened to a psychologist who was sure she was above it. 🧵

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Mina Cikara is a Harvard psychologist. One night she went to a baseball game with a guy she liked. She didn't care about either team, and barely knew the rules.

Her date was cheering for the away team, in a stadium packed with home fans. That made him an enemy to many in the crowd.

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All through the month of October, we’re bringing you some of the stories that have deeply resonated with us over the past five years.

This week: When a group of girls were bullying Jennifer in middle school, someone unexpected stepped in and changed the way she saw the world.

https://t.co/H6ZcrLi3tJ

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Your boss sends you an email. She needs to meet with you on Friday at 4 p.m. If you’re like many people, your first thought is:

“I’m going to get fired.”

In this week’s episode, why our minds jump to the worst-case scenario— and how to tell ourselves a different story.

https://t.co/AAz6afrInC

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The candle answer feels obvious once you see it. So do the solutions you're walking past right now, at work and in your own head.

The most creative people ask just one question more than the rest of us: What else could this be?

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For 80 years, psychologists have used a simple test to measure creativity. All you need to try it yourself is a candle, a box of tacks, and matches. Once you have them, solve the following puzzle:

Attach the candle to the wall so it burns without dripping on the floor. Most people can't do it. 🧵

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That mental block is what separates most people from particularly creative ones. We get so used to seeing the main use for an item that we stop seeing the other ways we could use it.

And creativity, in large part, is the habit of breaking objects and ideas out of the one role you assigned them.

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Scientists looked for what predicts creativity. The strongest signal? A serious romantic relationship with someone from a different culture. Not casual contact. The worldview you wrestle with for years is what rewires how you think.

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“You can't treat your automatic thoughts as if they were true.”

Last week, psychologist Martin Seligman explored why some people come to believe that their actions don’t matter. This week, he explains how we can strengthen our sense of agency and learn to see new possibilities. He offers practical strategies for building confidence in our ability to shape what happens next.

https://t.co/IMNSJUd3Y8

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Sharpening what you're already good at feels productive. Sometimes it is.

But often the growth that actually changes your life is on the other side of being bad at something new. Skip that, and you'll be flawless at what you can already do, but never grow past it.

[Hidden Brain @HiddenBrain]

Pay attention to where your effort goes. Does it pour into the tasks you've already got down, the safe details you can polish to a shine?

[Hidden Brain @HiddenBrain]

Every skill that could truly change your life starts the same way: you first have to be bad at it.

And being bad at something, even for a while, is the one thing a perfectionist can't stand. So we never begin.