Hidden Brain

In her new book Humor, Seriously, co-authored with Naomi Bagdonas, Jennifer examines the effects of the humor cliff.

Jennifer, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Along with Naomi Bagdonas, she is co-author of the book Humor, Seriously.

And one of them is Homer who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey.

The book is titled, Together, the Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

Vivek Murthy is the Surgeon General of the United States He's the author of the book Together, the healing power of human connection in a sometimes lonely world

Then, when we are really hot, we go to the bookstore and cover all of the Glenn Beck books with copies of The Audacity of Hope.

She's a liberal who has spent years talking to people who politically disagree with her in an attempt to understand what she calls their deep story.

And then you constructed something that you call a deep story. It's a story that you say feels emotionally true. It captures, as you say, the hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety of people.

So, when people sort of internalize the story, the story, this feeling that you're waiting in line, that people are cutting in line, and that the people who are supposed to be minding the line and maintaining order are in some ways betraying how the line is supposed to operate, that this deep story, when you ran the story by the people you met and befriended, many of them told you that you had captured something that felt true to them.

Many of the women you spoke with obviously endorse the conservative deep story. But you also point out that in some ways they are the victims of this deep story, that the deep story in some ways is resentful of women for being in the workplace, advancing in the workplace, perhaps at the expense of men.

It feels like you're laying out for me something that is actually a paradox. Many of the people you spoke with, they're older, they're mostly white. Many of them are men. They tell you they feel like they're Strangers in Their Own Land. But that's also the way the African American man who gets repeatedly pulled over by the police also feels.

In the 1997 drama Life is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni plays an Italian bookshop owner.

He is Jewish and during the Holocaust, the Nazis deport him and his small son to a concentration camp.

Surrounded by squalor and fear, the father has a choice.

Life is Beautiful went on to win a raft of awards, including a Best Actor Oscar for Roberto Benigni.

Millions laughed and wept as they heard the story of the brave father who reinvented reality to help his son survive the Holocaust.

It also comes from the Amazon original series The Man In The High Castle, which imagines a world where the Allies lost World War II and America is ruled by Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. But revelations in secret prophetic films prove our future belongs to those who change it.

In one of the movie versions of the Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the actor Hurd Hatfield stares longingly at a painting of himself. The picture shows a young man bursting with health and vitality. As Dorian Gray reflects on how he is going to change with age while his picture will stay the same, a strange wish passes through his head.

Stephen Cave is the author of Immortality, the Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.

Much of the book revolves around a philosophical conundrum that Stephen calls the mortality paradox.

You argue in the book that we find four distinct ways and have found these four distinct ways throughout human history to resolve this mortality paradox.

He's the author of Immortality.

Philosopher Stephen Cave works at the University of Cambridge. He's the author of the book Immortality, The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.

Along with Heather Hansen and Thuy Nguyen, she's co-author of the book Solitude, The Science and Power of Being Alone.

Neda, you say that the first step to becoming better friends with ourselves is to understand the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be alone.

Neda Weinstein is a psychologist at the University of Reading in England, along with Heather Hansen and Thuy Nguyen. She's co-author of the book Solitude, The Science and Power of Being Alone.

And so I was just chatting with my co-author, Heather Henson, about the book at the time and I kind of mentioned this to her because a child had come to the door and she said, you know, you're writing a book about how Solitude can actually be a positive experience. And yet you're quite worried about your daughter here.

He talks about this album as his samurai record, all stripped down for fighting.

My first book is called The How of Happiness, where I talked about 12 different strategies to make people happier.

And my friend Teresa, who then was a very devout Catholic, did the philosophy of Peter Singer because I think she had heard her dad complaining about Peter Singer and this guy who wanted to abort infants or something.

Daryl Van Tongeren is a psychologist at Hope College and the author of Humble, Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World.

Darrell Van Tongeren is a psychologist at Hope College and the author of Humble, Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World.

In his 1871 book, The Descent Of Man, Charles Darwin tells a story about a group of monkeys at the zoo.

He writes, monkey after monkey, with head raised high and turned on one side, could not resist taking a momentary peep into the upright bag and the dreadful object lying quietly at the bottom.

And he wrote this book called The Paradox of Choice.

Martin Seligman years ago wrote a book called Learned Optimism based on his research in learned helplessness.

Her upcoming book, written with her fellow political scientist John Barry Ryan, is called... "The Other Divide, Polarization and Disengagement in American Politics."

Unseating Bob Woodward's Fear, Trump and the White House.