Podcast: Hidden Brain

I discovered the Hidden Brain podcast late last year and it’s quickly become a favourite.

The Hidden Brain helps curious people understand the world – and themselves. Using science and storytelling, Hidden Brain’s host Shankar Vedantam reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, the biases that shape our choices, and the triggers that direct the course of our relationships.

It’s a mishmash of topics, all delivered by a curious, engaged host who has enough background knowledge to ask good questions and never fails to get me thinking about how I act, how I engage with the world, and how I am affected by the world around me.

The most recent episode is one that touches on the world we live in today, tracing back through from the roots of advertising to the simple notion that is pretty evident to everyone I know, “our mental space is under attack by attention hijackers”. It also touches on how Trump became President, the first popular usage of fake news, and just how much advertisers will lie to us.

The big takeaway for me from this episode was to find a way to be more mindful with my everyday attention. It’s too easy to ‘just spend 10 minutes’ on Buzzfeed (also mentioned in the podcast) and lose most of a day without really paying attention to it; those times where a quick google at 10pm suddenly finds you watching YouTube videos at 1am are all down to manufactured content deliberately created to draw us in and keep our attention.

How often do you decide what holds your attention?

Listen to the full episode here:

And you can subscribe to future episodes using this RSS Link.

Got any podcast recommendations? I’d love to hear them.