Hidden Brain

The U.S. health care system now is a $3.5 trillion industry. It's consuming about 18% of the U.S. economy.

And that's around 2.5 to 3 times as much as our colleagues say in much of Europe, in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on.

We're paying for action, but we're not really paying for results.

And so the assumptions are more care is better, more visits are better, more treatment is better.

I'm not necessarily saying that doctors want people to be sick, but the financial incentives of the system seem to be almost against prevention in favor of actually treating problems once they arise.

The upshot of the story was it's a 12-year-old Vietnamese-American daughter of a white war veteran and a Vietnamese woman. And she's growing up in the Deep South, and she's basically coping with, you know, the legacy of Southern racism and violence from her father's war experience.

I felt very nervous and insecure about what I was doing. There was a lot of discussion in the blogosphere, on Twitter, a lot of conversation. Some of it got really heated. And I just started to feel more and more like I wasn't comfortable writing an Asian-American character.

They would say, you don't have a right to write about this character because you don't know what it's like to grow up as an Asian-American girl in this culture.

As my thinking evolved on it, I felt like these people really have a point. Like there is a way in which I cannot write authentically about being an Asian-American girl in the deep south in the 1980s.

She does not kill the deer. It's a wounded deer. And she actually nurses the deer back to health and sets it free. And when I read the novel, I cried because for me, that was healing.

He explores this idea in his book, The Moral Economy.

Having more options doesn't always lead to better or happier decisions.

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

Vivek Murthy served as the 19th 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.

In her new book, Turned On, Science, Sex and Robots, Kate describes the moment she first gazed up close at a life-size silicone woman.

Kate Devlin teaches the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. She's also the author of Turned On Science, Sex and Robots.

I'm reading this great book by Louis O'Delmonti called The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.

In her book, How Population Change Will Transform Our World, she shows how large-scale demographic shifts shape intimate aspects of our lives, from the number of children we choose to have to how we care for aging parents.

I might look at my colleague Steve Inskeep and notice he not only hosts a popular public radio program, It's Morning Edition from NPR News.

Economist Robert Shiller's new book explores this idea. It's called Narrative Economics.

Robert Schiller won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. He's the author of Narrative Economics, how stories go viral and drive major economic events.

Back in 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam wrote about this idea in his book Bowling Alone.

It was a book by a recently deceased cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, and that one was called The Birth and Death of Meaning.

Sheldon Solomon is a psychology professor at Skidmore College. Along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pizinski, he's the co-author of The Worm at the Core on the Role of Death in Life.

If people hadn't been telling each other about these things, nobody would believe that there were vegetable lambs because nobody had ever seen them, right?

So one reason we wrote this book is that we noticed that a lot of people thinking about fake news and false belief were thinking about problems with individual psychology.

But if you imagine this social spread of beliefs as opening a door when you open a door for true beliefs to spread from person to person, you also open the door for false beliefs to spread from person to person.

We don't like to publicly state things that are different from the people in our social networks.

So it's not just that it's a weird new idea that none of them believe in their kind of in-group. It's also that it's coming from Turkey, and furthermore, it's coming from women in Turkey.

He writes about the contradictions in our attitudes toward mice and other creatures in his book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals.

The original title of my book was Feeding Kittens to Boa Constrictors.

Tell me about another story that you describe in the book.

It's the sort of contradiction that we see all the time in our relationships with animals. And that's why the field of anthozoology, the new science of human-animal interactions is so both intellectually and also sort of psychologically fascinating because we all have to live with these contradictions.

Hal Herzog is a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. He's the author of the book, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Why it's so hard to think straight about animals.

She's the author of a book about Anton Messmer and his followers.

At the heart of your book is an argument about how celebrities become celebrities and and you say it has a lot to do with being part of a very elite Invite only network.

When I started looking at celebrities, I was trying to figure out if there were particular Personal attributes even talent attributes that drove, you know the rise of a celebrity and it was it was really hard to come up with them.

The only way to become an a-list celebrity is to be Invited to the club.

It's not an iterative thing Like if I just keep toiling away as a B list celebrity at some point, I'm going to be a list That's not how it happens.

If you're not, you know a young star is born and you can immediately become an a-lister because you've starred in this great film and you're You know this actress or actor who was just discovered but the other way is if you're already in the Hollywood machine that you jump in is if you've either connected with someone or You've done something with your career that enables you to leap.