Hidden Brain

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In her book, Hitler at Home, Despina Stratigakos explores how the Nazi propaganda machine created an image of Hitler as a humble man of the people at ease in nature.

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In her book, Hitler at Home, Despina Stratigakos explores how the Nazi propaganda machine created an image of Hitler as a humble man of the people at ease in nature.

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Power does make us a little bit more self-focused, but this can happen to us all. This is just what the mind does when we feel powerful.

It's why I call the book The Power Paradox, which is, you know, if you look at this social science of power, we get power through, you know, the pro-social tendencies that we are endowed with, but then once we feel powerful or we come from a background of privilege and feeling above others, we lose those tendencies.

And it really lends credence to Lord Acton's old observation that I think stands the test of time, which is power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Power is part of every moment of our social lives we've got to be aware of it, it can lead us to do foolish things and we should try to do the things that make it a force for good.

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Docker Kantner is the author of the new book, The Power Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence.

One of the things that the science of power has done, which I report on in The Power Paradox, is to take a step back and think, what do we really mean by power?

So and that's why I call the book The Power Paradox, which is, you know, if you look at this social science of power, we get power through, you know, the pro-social tendencies that we are endowed with.

And again, this is part of The Power Paradox, which is that there is this really interesting literature called competitive altruism.

Dacher Keltner is a psychologist at the University of California...He's the author of The Power Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence.

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Docker Kantner is the author of the new book, The Power Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence.

And so one of the things that the science of power has done, which I report on in The Power Paradox, is to take a step back and think, what do we really mean by power?

So and that's why I call the book The Power Paradox, which is, you know, if you look at this social science of power, we get power through, you know, the pro-social tendencies that we are endowed with.

And again, this is part of The Power Paradox, which is that there is this really interesting literature called competitive altruism.

Dacher Keltner is a psychologist at the University of California. He's the author of The Power Paradox, How We Gain and Lose Influence.

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If I'm allowed to have a favorite forger, which I know sounds a little bit funny, it would be Eric Hebron, who's really the prince of art forgers. He's the author of The Art of Forgery.

And his story is one of revenge over monetary gain. That's why he turned to forgery.

He initially had been a failed artist. He couldn't get traction with his own original artworks, even though he had some serious talent.

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Noah Charney is the author of The Art of Forgery, The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers.

Hebern was particularly meticulous. And of all of the forgers I looked at, he was really the one who was the most passionate as an art historian and as a researcher and was focused on getting the materials correct whenever he could.

Hebern is the only one of all the artists I looked at, all the art forgers I looked at, who I think was at a similar level to the people he was forging.

He couldn't have done the forgeries if he hadn't done the scholarship.

And he is up there in terms of his physical ability to reproduce another artist's style, the care that he put in both the concept of playing with the artist's existing oeuvre and reproducing the materials in an accurate way.

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Noah Charney is the author of The Art of Forgery, The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers.

Hebern was particularly meticulous. And of all of the forgers I looked at, he was really the one who was the most passionate as an art historian and as a researcher and was focused on getting the materials correct whenever he could.

And he is the only one of all the artists I looked at, all the art forgers I looked at, who I think was at a similar level to the people he was forging.

He couldn't have done the forgeries if he hadn't done the scholarship.

And he is up there in terms of his physical ability to reproduce another artist's style, the care that he put in both the concept of playing with the artist's existing oeuvre and reproducing the materials in an accurate way.

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And one of his tricks was to get drunk. He would get drunk while he was making the drawings and it would achieve a certain fluidity of line and body. He would not overthink things.

He would do dozens of sketches to prepare the fluidity of line he was after, but then he would start drinking heavily and then do his sketches as well in order to ensure that he wouldn't overthink things.

And one of his tricks was to get drunk.

And he wrote a book called The Art Forger's Handbook, which incidentally has been found in the studio of many an art forger arrested since it came out.

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And one of his tricks was to get drunk. He would get drunk while he was making the drawings and it would achieve a certain fluidity of line and body and the process, he would not overthink things.

He would do dozens of sketches to prepare the fluidity of line he was after, but then he would start drinking heavily and then do his sketches as well in order to ensure that he wouldn't overthink things.

And that's one of the ways we can work backwards and see, well, if these were the techniques employed by Hebron, other forgers might have used similar techniques. And future forgers literally reproduced the recipes that he put into play in his book.

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And he wrote a book called The Art Forger's Handbook, which incidentally has been found in the studio of many an art forger rested since it came out.

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Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of What We Value, The Neuroscience of Choice and Change.

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Emily Falk is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of What We Value, The Neuroscience of Choice and Change.

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Emily Falk is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of What We Value, The Neuroscience of Choice and Change.

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In George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, there were lots of ways to get in trouble with a totalitarian state. Protesting in the street was a quick way to get seized by the authorities, but you could also get in trouble for subtler things, like reading the wrong book or having the wrong opinions.

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In George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, there were lots of ways to get in trouble with a totalitarian state.

Protesting in the street was a quick way to get seized by the authorities, but you could also get in trouble for subtler things, like reading the wrong book or having the wrong opinions.

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He's the author of the book, Awe, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

Dacher Keltner is a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He's the author of Awe, the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life.

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He's the author of the book Awe the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life.

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Now you've always loved reading and around this time you fell in love with a very popular book series. What was it? It was The Twilight Saga.

And can you tell me a little bit about what The Twilight Saga is? I confess I have not read the books. What is their broad plot and what is it about?

Well, you know, I was turned on to The Twilight Saga when I dropped my kids off at elementary school and there was a group of moms clustered around. Megan was one of the moms, my friend, and they were all laughing hysterically.

And I went over and I said, hey, what's so funny? And Megan said, oh, I've been reading this romance novel that I absolutely love. And I went into the bookstore to try to get the sequel and I couldn't find it.

So I went up to the bookstore owner and I said, hey, you know, where's the sequel? And he said, it's in the teenager section.

So all the moms started cracking up. They thought that was the funniest thing. But she said, but you guys have to read it. It's so good.

So I said, okay, Megan, what is it called? Because I'm always looking for a good read, right?

She said, oh, it's called The Twilight Saga.

So I thought, okay, I'll give it a try. And it was absolutely mesmerizing for me. It was as if I had never read a novel in my life. And all of a sudden, this novel about a bunch of teenage vampires running around biting each other on the neck just absolutely transported me.

It was really weird.

So the Twilight books eventually spawned a very popular series of films.

I want to play you a clip from one of those movies. A teenage girl named Bella is confronting a boy she knows, Edward, about his true nature. I know what you are.

Say it out loud. Say it. Vampire.

Are you afraid?

No.

Okay.

So there are a lot of, you know, breathless pauses here, but I'm hearing, you know, fantasy paranormal stuff, but it sounds like an innocent enough pastime, Anna.

Oh, an innocent enough pastime? Sure. It always starts out innocent.

And of course, you know, it was, but what happened was it changed the way I felt in the moment in a way that resonated so deeply that I wanted to keep recreating that feeling.

And what was that feeling? It was essentially a feeling of non-being.

While I was reading The Twilight Saga, it just transported me to another time and place such that I completely forgot myself.

And that self forgetting was clearly something that I needed and wanted.

You know, I read the whole saga.

I think it's like four books.

And then I wanted to recreate that feeling again.

So I read the whole saga again.

Wow.

Pleasurable, but not as pleasurable as the first time around.

But by then I was completely tapped into this whole genre of vampire romance novels.

And so I started to invest larger and larger amounts of time, energy, and creativity into obtaining and reading vampire romance novels.

You know, seemingly innocent to start with, but it became a bit of an obsession.

And when I ran out of vampire romance novels, I moved on to werewolf romance novels.

And then there was necromancers and soothsayers and all kinds of paranormal romance novels.

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Now, you've always loved reading. And around this time, you fell in love with a very popular book series. What was it? It was The Twilight Saga.

And all of a sudden, this novel about a bunch of teenage vampires running around biting each other on the neck just absolutely transported me. It was really weird.

While I was reading The Twilight Saga, it just transported me to another time and place such that I completely forgot myself. I read the whole saga, I think it's like four books, and then I wanted to recreate that feeling again.

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Angela Duckworth is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also founder and scientific director of the Character Lab. Her new book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, is out this spring.

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I remember talking to Angela Duckworth many years ago after she wrote her book on Grit, and one of her studies was looking at spelling bee champions, and the thing that she found was that spelling bee champions obviously put in a lot of time and preparation, but they also did what she called deliberate practice, and the way she defined deliberate practice was very similar to what you're talking about, Dan, which is it was a process of deliberately trying to identify areas of weakness and focus on those areas of weakness.

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Yeah one thing that stuck with me was his bow cut right. His haircut was just cut straight across down and I think the way that framed his face was just he looked like a psychopath.

And so part of me thought that the way he looked was the way the actor looked. And so to me I was like well that must be an easy role since the actor looks like that. It's easy for him to play a psychopath.

And at the Oscars like Javier Bardem you know is a very attractive man right and very handsome, warm you know he transformed himself physically for that role.

And it's really interesting because sometimes you think I mean that's the same person.

The person in the movie would not be someone that you would judge as attractive right. Not attractive, unattractive and yet he as an actor is extremely attractive.

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Yeah one thing that stuck with me was his bow cut right. His haircut was just cut straight across down and I think the way that framed his face was just he looked like a psychopath.

And so part of me thought that the way he looked was the way the actor looked. And so to me I was like well that must be an easy role since the actor looks like that. It's easy for him to play a psychopath.

And at the Oscars like Javier Bardem you know is a very attractive man right and very handsome, warm you know he transformed himself physically for that role.

And it's really interesting because sometimes you think I mean that's the same person. The person in the movie would not be someone that you would judge as attractive right. Not attractive, unattractive and yet he as an actor is extremely attractive.

I mean really what this shows is that he was actually acting. He wasn't just playing himself. He was actually acting.

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I did it with page turners. I listened to audiobooks. So whatever, you know, the latest Harry Potter novel or Hunger Games novel that I was listening to, I just wanted to know what happened next.

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I did it with page turners. I listened to audiobooks so whatever you know the latest Harry Potter novel or Hunger Games novel that I was listening to I just wanted to know what happened next. So I'm rushing to the gym time is flying while I'm there.

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So Massimo, it has to be tempting to carry around a copy of Meditations to talk the Marcus Aurelius talk, but not walk the Marcus Aurelius walk?

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The book was The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which is a Stoic book. ... when I opened it up at random, one of the first few sentences that I found ... you don't like the cucumber because it's bitter. Well, don't eat it. Why do you have to go on and complain about the fact that there are bitter cucumbers in the world?

I don't need the additional step of complaining and wallowing in this fact that the world is so unfair because there's bitter cucumbers.

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The term comes from actually Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in the book Nudge.

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If you've read Thaler's previous book, Nudge, you know he's an economist who studies why people don't really act the way traditional economists say they will.

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I'm thinking about that book that came out some years ago, The Millionaire Next Door, and was all about how the people who are next door living very ordinary lives, you know, driving, you know, 12-year-old cars and, you know, not even very expensive cars, these are the people who are truly wealthy.

One of the most profound things about The Millionaire Next Door is it took our vision of who rich people are and how they live their life and it just turned it on its head.

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I'm thinking about that book that came out some years ago, The Millionaire Next Door. And it was all about how the people who are next door living very ordinary lives, driving 12-year-old cars and not even very expensive cars, these are the people who are truly wealthy.

One of the most profound things about The Millionaire Next Door is it took our vision of who rich people are and how they live their life and it just turned it on its head.

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This is the story told in the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.

It was written by an English schoolteacher named William Golding and it reflected his harsh view of humans in general, and children in particular.

The novel entered the cultural consciousness as a warning.

Without rules, systems, and adult supervision, children left alone would descend into chaos.

There was a real case in the 1960s of a group of schoolboys about the same age as the fictitious children in Lord of the Flies living on a Pacific island.

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the story told in the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Flies

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Peter Gray is a psychologist at Boston College. He's the author of Free to Learn. Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant and better students for life.

Peter Gray is a psychologist at Boston College. He's the author of Free to Learn, Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant and Better Students for Life.

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Peter gray is a psychologist at boston college he is the author of Free to Learn why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier more self-reliant and better students for life

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Stephanie Johnson is a psychologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. She's also the author of Inclusify, The Power of Uniqueness and Belonging to Build Innovative Teams.

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It really made me think about Dante's Inferno, these paintings of suffering people.

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Whereas Dante in The Divine Comedy describes in great detail where he thought all the souls were.

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Lucy Hone is a public health researcher and practitioner in New Zealand she's the author of Resilient Grieving finding strength and embracing life after a loss that changes everything.

She was not just a grieving mom and researcher but a writer and she found that putting her experience on the page gave her both perspective and comfort. Her writing eventually became a book titled Resilient Grieving.

One of the ideas she explored in the book had to do with how many people deal with grief by asking why me? Lucy came to see that this was counterproductive.

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one of the ideas she explored in the book had to do with how many people deal with grief by asking why me

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, describes the story of a man who desperately tried to climb the social ladder.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther and one fine morning. So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, describes the story of a man who desperately tried to climb the social ladder. The final lines of the novel are amongst the most famous in literature.