Hidden Brain

She's the author of Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and researcher in the behavioral sciences at Stanford University. She's the author of *Dopamine Nation*, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and researcher in the behavioral sciences at Stanford University. She's the author of *Dopamine Nation*, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

She's the author of Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

Kevin Coakley is a psychologist at the University of Michigan. He's the author of The Myth of Black Anti-Intellectualism, A True Psychology of African American Students.

Kevin Coakley is a psychologist at the University of Michigan. He's the author of The Myth of Black Anti-Intellectualism, A True Psychology of African American Students.

Liz told me that at one point in the interminable journey to the Arctic Ocean, she decided she'd had enough.

So I was like, okay, great. Sure. I just published this book and you think the first chapter is completely wrong. Like let's talk about that.

And so I started with my colleagues and students exploring when people get the biggest emotional boost from giving to charity and when that emotional boost seems to sort of disappear.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the science of happier spending.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending.

After I wrote my book Happy Money and the first chapter was called By Experiences, I gave it out to a bunch of the grad students in my department.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the science of happier spending.

Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of Happy Money, the Science of Happier Spending.

And so I gave it out to a bunch of the grad students in my department. And this very smart young grad student named Aaron Weidman came to see me.

And he's like, you know, I love the book. I think chapter one was wrong. He's like, I think this whole by experiences recommendation is, you know, bunk.

In his book, Influence, Bob Cialdini writes about the psychology of persuasion.

He describes seven techniques that we can use to influence those around us.

These tools can be applied in many areas of life and they can be used for good ends and for bad ones.

Social proof, for example, can be used to help people cut back on energy consumption.

In his book, Influence, Bob Cialdini writes about the psychology of persuasion.

Robert Cialdini is the author of Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion.

Samantha Power wrote in her book, 'A Problem From Hell,' about the response from one administrator to the warning that was given that unless his telephones were ringing, he couldn't do anything.

Samantha Power wrote in her book, Problem from Hell, about the response from one administrator to the warning that was given that unless his telephones were ringing, he couldn't do anything.

Samantha Power wrote in her book, Problem from Hell, about the response from one administrator to the warning that was given that unless his telephones were ringing, he couldn't do anything.

We can lose our freedom and become entrapped really by doing what we think are voluntary choices.

We've explored how advertisements influence our minds. In the next segment of our show, we explore how celebrities, entrepreneurs, and media companies hijack our attention in order to present us with ads.

Attention is the fuel that allows everyone from candy makers to car dealers to sell their wares.

I think that Donald Trump, through The Apprentice and to some degree other parts of his life, understood deeply the power of capturing and using human attention.

And so deciding how that vital resource is spent, in my view, is the key to life, frankly.

Tim Wu has written a book titled The Attention Merchants where he recounts the history of the many ways our attention has been hijacked.

Attention merchants are television shows, newspaper articles and podcasts that draw you in and then sell your attention to advertisers.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He's the author of The Attention Merchants, the epic scramble to get inside our heads.

Columbia University law professor Tim Wu has written a book titled The Attention Merchants, where he recounts the history of the many ways our attention has been hijacked.

Today, we're talking with author Tim Wu about his book, The Attention Merchants, the epic scramble to get inside our heads.

Attention merchants are television shows, newspaper articles and podcasts that draw you in and then sell your attention to advertisers.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He's the author of The Attention Merchants, the epic scramble to get inside our heads.

We'd only bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it? The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

We're going to play a few clips from the movies as we chat, and this one comes from the movie Eat, Pray, Love, featuring Julia Roberts.

We'd only bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it? The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

She in some sense helps to epitomize both the strengths and the weaknesses of this modern contemporary approach to marriage where we're looking to our spouse again not only for love but also this sense of personal growth and fulfillment.

One example of this comes from the bestselling book by Elizabeth Gilbert about walking out on her husband and trying to create a more meaningful life for herself.

We'd only bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it?

The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

JK Rowling, when she was struggling to finish The Deathly Hallows, rented out this big suite at the Balmore Hotel next to the big castle in downtown Edinburgh where she'd go and just think Harry Potter style thoughts.

J.K. Rowling, when she was struggling to finish The Deathly Hallows, rented out this big suite at the Balmore Hotel next to the big castle in downtown Edinburgh where she'd go and just think Harry Potter-style thoughts.

J.K. Rowling, when she was struggling to finish The Deathly Hallows, rented out this big suite at the Balmore Hotel next to the big castle in downtown Edinburgh where she'd go and just think Harry Potter-style thoughts.

Modern marriage, he says, runs the risk of suffocation.

Eli Finkel is a social psychologist at Northwestern University. He's the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, How the Best Marriages Work.

Eli is the author of The All or Nothing Marriage, and he has a very dramatic term for the challenge that many couples face today.

Modern marriage, he says, runs the risk of suffocation.

So in the terminology of psychology, we wanted to self-actualize through our marriage.

And for the first time you start to see cases where people would say, as I think Liz Gilbert would say, that she was in a loving marriage and he was a good man and treated her well but she felt stagnant and she really wasn't willing to endure a stagnant life for the next 30 or 40 years and she walked out.

It's lovely way up there at the top and if we're looking to try to achieve not only this sense of love and connection but also this sense of personal growth and authenticity through the marriage but we're trying to do it on the cheap that is we're trying to do it without investing the time without investing the psychological energy then we're left up there at the top of the mountain without the resources that we need in order to succeed and so that is what gives us this disconnect between where we are on the mountain the expectations that we're bringing to the marriage and what the marriage is actually able to offer us and that disconnect is what I'm talking about when I talk about the suffocation of marriage.

Eli is the author of The All or Nothing Marriage and he has a very dramatic term for the challenge that many couples face today.

Modern marriage, he says, runs the risk of suffocation.

My guest today says what we see affects more than just what we see. It also affects how we behave. Psychologist Emily Balcheres at New York University is the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

Emily Bolcheres is a psychologist and the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

Emily's insights on goal pursuit have come from running experiments on other people, but she's also treated herself like a research subject. She has used the techniques she described here to help her learn to play the drums.

That's what I talk about in this book is these tactics that I suggest others try. I tried them all out on myself across the course of this year, my son's first year of life, and that would happen to be also the same amount of time that it took me in order to learn this song.

Psychologist Emily Balcedes works at New York University. She's the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

My guest today says what we see affects more than just what we see. It also affects how we behave. Psychologist Emily Balceres at New York University is the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

Emily's insights on goal pursuit have come from running experiments on other people, but she's also treated herself like a research subject. She has used the techniques she described here to help her learn to play the drums.

And that would happen to be also the same amount of time that it took me in order to learn this song. I wasn't a fast learner, but I got there.

Psychologist Emily Balcedes works at New York University. She's the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

My guest today says what we see affects more than just what we see. It also affects how we behave. Psychologist Emily Balcheres at New York University is the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

Psychologist Emily Balcedes works at New York University. She's the author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World.

In your book, Choke, you tell the story of the French golfer, Jean Van Der Velde at the British Open in 1999.

You write in the book that the key is to have brain power at your disposal, but be able to turn it off when that brain power is a problem.

She's also the author of Choke, What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.

In your book, Choke, you tell the story of the French golfer, Jean Van Der Velde at the British Open in 1999.

You write in the book that the key is to have brain power at your disposal, but be able to turn it off when that brain power is a problem.

So my research and others have shown that when people learn actually really early, they often are protected from choking in these sorts of especially motor skills.

Sian Bailock is a psychologist and the newly elected president of Dartmouth College. She's also the author of Choke, What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.

In your book, Choke, you tell the story of the French golfer Jean van der Weld at the British Open in 1999.

You write in the book that the key is to have brain power at your disposal but be able to turn it off when that brain power is a problem.

Psychologist Sian Bailock is president of Barnard College. She's also the author of Choke, What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.

So my research and others have shown that when people learn actually really early they often are protected from choking in these sorts of especially motor skills.

Well, I've been studying the history of family life for many, many years, but I specifically got interested in marriage as we got into these debates about what traditional marriage was.

Marriage originally arose in more egalitarian band level societies as a way of sharing resources and establishing peaceful relations with groups that you might otherwise only see occasionally and you might not know if they were going to be friends or enemies.

I think that the theme song for that relationship could have been What's Love Got to Do With It? There may have been passion, but it was more passion for power than sexual, although sexual probably entered into it too.

You couldn't run a farm with one person. You couldn't run a bakery with one person. So people who were bakers married other bakers.

And so there was a long period of time where men actually were more romantic than women in the courtship arena.

Well, I've been studying the history of family life for many, many years, but I specifically got interested in marriage as we got into these debates about what traditional marriage was.

Marriage originally arose in more egalitarian band level societies as a way of sharing resources and establishing peaceful relations with groups that you might otherwise only see occasionally and you might not know if they were going to be friends or enemies.

I marry my child off to you and that means you owe me things but I also owe you things.

You couldn't run a farm with one person. You couldn't run a bakery with one person so people who were bakers married other bakers.

If you were a peasant you wanted somebody who had a good reputation as a hard worker and that was much more important than this frivolous luxury is the way it was really thought of as how attracted you were to the person.

Wendy Smith is a professor of business at the University of Delaware. With her co-author, Marianne Lewis, she's the author of Both & Thinking, Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems.

Wendy Smith is a professor of business at the University of Delaware. With her co-author, Marianne Lewis, she's the author of Both & Thinking, Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems.

Wendy Smith is a professor of business at the University of Delaware. With her co-author, Marianne Lewis, she's the author of Both & Thinking, Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems.

I'm talking to John McWhorter he's a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of the book Words on the Move Why English Won't and Can't Sit Still Like Literally

Dictionaries are wonderful things but they create an illusion that there's such thing as a language that stands still when really it's the nature of human language to change.

It's as if you saw a person, I'm not going to say at four because then the person is growing up and if I use that analogy then it seems like I'm saying that language grows up or it moves towards something or it develops.

Mistakes and errors are what turned Latin into French.

Lol was an expression it was a piece of language and so you knew that its meaning was going to change the only question was in which way and it ended up becoming less a direct reflection of hearty laughter than an indication of the kind of almost subconscious laughter that we do in any kind of conversation that's meant as friendly.

Language is a parade and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still if the language stayed the way it was it would be like a pressed flower in a book or as i say i think it would be like some inflatable doll rather than a person I think that it's better to think of language as a parade that either you're watching or frankly that you're in especially because the people are never going to stand still it's never happened it's never going to and if you can enjoy it as a parade instead of wondering why people keep walking instead of just sitting on chairs and blowing on their tubas and not moving then you have more fun I want everybody to have the fun I'm having.

John McWhorter is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He's also the author of a new book, Words on the Move. Why English Won't and Can't Sit Still Like Literally.

I love this analogy you have in the book where you mention how thinking that a word has only one meaning is like looking at a snapshot taken at one point in a person's life and saying, this photograph represents the entirety of what this person looks like.

We can't help as literate people thinking that the real language is something that sits still with letters written all nice and pretty on a page that can exist for hundreds of years.

One of the points you make in the book of course is that the evolution of words and their meanings is what gives us this flowering of hundreds or thousands of languages.

But I have to say, I noticed that you had a book out a few years ago that seemed to say the opposite. And it was titled Doing Our Own Thing, The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should Like Care.

The lives of the the richest people in the world are so Different from those of the rest of us. It's almost literally unimaginable.

National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.

The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.

It's potentially very very dangerous and I think she's right about that.

Some of them actually do sound a lot like Donald Trump when I heard Donald Trump say that not paying taxes made him smart and That if he had paid his taxes, they would have been wasted anyways I was like, yep, he's the voice of a lot of very wealthy people around the world and And their wealth managers who said essentially the same thing to me.

I understand you conducted about 65 interviews in 18 countries for this book.

My guest today is a sociologist, Brooke Harrington. She spent years trying to understand the lives of people who are so wealthy that they're able to circumvent the constraints of national laws and borders.

Brooke Harrington is a sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. She's the author of the book Capital without Borders, Wealth Managers and the 1%.

The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.

I understand you conducted about 65 interviews in 18 countries for this book.

She's the author of the book Capital without Borders, Wealth Managers and the 1%.

We think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain rung with some people above us and other people below us and Where we think we stand on that ladder tells you a lot about a person's life and their their life outcomes.

And as the scale of inequality gets larger and larger as it's been doing in the United States and other advanced economies around the world It becomes harder and harder to climb that ladder for a number of reasons.

And so when the scale of inequality gets out of proportion to what we can psychologically handle The ladder is essentially broken. It becomes harder and harder to occupy the rung that we think we ought to be on.

Inequality does a few different things to the way that both our minds and our bodies respond One is that it makes us focused on the short term. It makes us impulsive focused on the here and now And it makes us More willing to seek out risks and engage in high risk high reward sort of gambling behaviors it also affects our bodies in ways that are Similar to physical threats.

So the social threat of feeling lower on the status ladder than somebody else provokes very similar reactions Physiologically to a physical stressor So we react as if we were about to be physically attacked we react with stress responses as if we were about to face a literal physical challenge and The total of all of those effects adds up to Feeling that we're constantly in crisis.

He's the author of The Broken Ladder, How Inequality Affects the Way We Live, Think, and Die.

One of the images that I use throughout the book to capture the relative differences between people is this idea of a status ladder that we think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain rung with some people above us and other people below us.

And so when the scale of inequality gets out of proportion to what we can psychologically handle, the ladder is essentially broken.

Keith Bain is a psychologist at the University of North Carolina. He's the author of The Broken Ladder, How Inequality Affects the Way We Live, Think and Die.

He's the author of The Broken Ladder, How Inequality Affects the Way We Live, Think, and Die.

One of the images that I use throughout the book to capture the relative differences between people is this idea of a status ladder that we think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain rung with some people above us and other people below us.

And so when the scale of inequality gets out of proportion to what we can psychologically handle, the ladder is essentially broken. It becomes harder and harder to occupy the rung that we think we ought to be on.

I think there's not really any option of not thinking about it because we're constantly making social comparisons to what others have around us to define what's normal and what's enough.

Keith Bain is a psychologist at the University of North Carolina. He's the author of The Broken Ladder, How Inequality Affects the Way We Live, Think, and Die.

In her book Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick Wendy argues that we can all become experts at building good habits and dismantling bad ones if we only stop to understand the psychology behind our routines.

Willpower is not actually we have found, the best way to achieve our goals and to change our behavior.

When surveys are done of Americans and their beliefs about how to change behavior, particularly something like obesity three-quarters of Americans think that it's a problem with self-control and willpower, that we just don't have enough and if we had more we'd all be thinner.

Habits are cognitive associations They're mental associations that we form when we repeat an action over and over again in a given context and then get a reward.

Wendy Wood is a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California She's the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

In her book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, Wendy argues that we can all become experts at building good habits and dismantling bad ones if we only stop to understand the psychology behind our routines.

One of the first studies we did, we tried to figure out what percentage of daily actions are habitual in the way that you describe. And what we found is that about 43% of everyday actions are done repeatedly, almost every day in the same context.

And that's a subtext that runs through much of your book, this idea that much of our lives actually is being run on autopilot.

It's as if, if they had to think about it, they realized, oh, this stuff really tastes bad, and so I'm not going to eat it anymore.

If you want to make it more difficult to do something, you want to stop yourself, then you figure out ways to add friction to the behaviors that you don't want to engage in. That makes you stop and think, and perhaps gives you a bit of a chance to realize, oh, this is not really what I intended. Maybe I can do something better.

In her book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, Wendy argues that we can all become experts at building good habits and dismantling bad ones if we only stop to understand the psychology behind our routines.

Wendy Wood is a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California. She's the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick.

This could be revolutionary You have to change the way you think about parenting because Amy Chua ignited a firestorm by sharing the surprising details of her strict parenting methods in the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

This is Focus on the Family, hosted by psychologist Dr. James Dobson, the author of such best-selling books on the family as Parenting Isn't for Cowards.

This is Focus on the Family, hosted by psychologist Dr. James Dobson, the author of such bestselling books on the family as Parenting Isn't for Cowards.

Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Tulane University. In her book, American Hookup, The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Lisa interviews college students and finds that hookup culture has a complex set of social rules.

Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Tulane University. She's the author of the book American The New Culture of Sex on Campus.

This year Lisa updated her research interviewing 150 students at Tulane.

You talk in the book about how even though, you know, talk about hookups is ubiquitous on college campuses, that doesn't necessarily reflect how much of it is actually going on.

I argue in the book that the worst thing a student can be called these days isn't slut and it's not even prude although that one's big one it's desperate so if the rule is that we're supposed to be having meaningless sex and we're enacting all the all the things that enable us to keep that illusion going even when that's not how people actually feel then it's against the rules for them to say I actually quite like you

Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Occidental College. In her book, American Hookup, The New Culture of Sex on Campus,

We spoke with several students in your book, Lisa, and we're going to hear from them in this conversation.

You talk in the book about how even though, you know, talk about hookups is ubiquitous on college campuses, that doesn't necessarily reflect how much of it is actually going on.

Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Occidental College and the author of the book American Hookup, The New Culture of Sex on Campus.

I argue in the book that the worst thing a student can be called these days isn't slut and it's not even prude, although that one's big one. It's desperate.

In her book, American Hookup, The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Lisa interviews college students and finds that hookup culture has a complex set of social rules.

Lisa Wade is a sociologist at Occidental College and the author of the book American Hookup, The New Culture of Sex on Campus.

In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, Chris concluded that early human society was marked by a remarkable egalitarianism.

Basically, if you look at the individual chimpanzees, you can see that the alpha male is the one that's most active. If you look at the individual chimpanzees and how they behave around their superiors, it's rather ambivalent.

The roots of democracy, he concluded, weren't in the American Declaration of Independence or even in ancient Greece. They're woven into the DNA of human beings.