Hidden Brain

So these loan officers, they frequently knew that they were making mortgages to people who had no chance of paying them back at all.

It is not an exaggeration when I say that literally dead people were getting mortgages.

Hal Hirschfeld is a psychologist at UCLA. He studies our relationship to our future selves the people we are going to become.

Hal, one of the challenges of seeing our future selves as a friend, a friend that we should care about, is that all the hard work only seems to go in one direction.

Hal Hirschfield is a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He's the author of Your Future Self How to Make Tomorrow Better Today.

I wrote a book called The Hilarious World of Depression about my experiences with comedy and mental illness.

Some kind of cloak. Well, let's see then. Put it on. Whoa! My body's gone! I know what that is! That's an invisibility cloak! I'm invisible?

And he said to me Sarah, I'm gonna send you a book in the mail so you can start your collection again.

I got a really nice book called the medieval book by Barbara A. Shailor.

dear Sarah, I have often thought of you and your family and that terrible flood of 2000 he meant 2001 as promised enclosed is a rather scholarly book which you may be slightly mature for your age but I thought it might help you shape your new library collection and as the years progress this book may grow in stature and value to you have a happy holiday season wish you and loved ones all the best cordially Bill Carver.

And I also received a letter in the mail and I'd like to read it to you.

John List is an economist at the University of Chicago. He's the author of The Voltage Effect, How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.

I saw five fat red books said Handbook of Social Psychology and the guy said you know you can have them for the equivalent I think of a dollar.

And on my the rest of my ride home I tried to read the first volume. There were lots of chapters on theory this and theory that that made no sense to me but there was a chapter called Research Methods in Social Psychology.

It was written by a man called Elliot Aronson and what Elliot had done in this chapter is to talk about the process of doing research.

The examples he used were all of these famous experiments on dissonance and I was just I think my jaw my jaw was just dropping after I heard each of those experiments and I couldn't believe that there were people somewhere in the world who were actually doing experiments which I had never heard or thought was possible.

You can do experiments on particles, you can do experiments on cells but experiments on social behavior that had never really even occurred to me as a possibility.

I felt like Camus' stranger in a way, like I am in a strange land that I just physically, temperature-wise, climate-wise, people-wise, I felt like a fish out of water.

And I would hear quotes of Blake and she told me about the prelude of Wordsworth and then also D.H. Lawrence and others.

Ken Sheldon studies how we come up with the goals that animate our lives He is the author of Freely Determined what the new psychology of the self teaches us about how to live

Psychologist Ken Sheldon works at the University of Missouri He is the author of Freely Determined what the new psychology of the self teaches us about how to live

Look at Proverbs 6 and 25 with me if you would. Whom to have sex with? Says do not lust after her beauty in your heart. How to avoid certain kinds of sex? Nor let her allure you with her eyelids.

If we remember the story of Achilles, you know, the great Greek warrior who fought at Troy.

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

Psychologist Tim Wilson is the author of the book Strangers to Ourselves.

one of my favorite is Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot and ...

In Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations, we are introduced to the character Miss Havisham. Many years earlier, she was jilted at the altar on her wedding day. She becomes obsessed with this moment and cannot move on from it.

He is the author of several books, including Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

So let's look at what that representative sample might look like and let's look at three basic measures that you discuss in the book, health, wealth, and happiness.

It's the same idea incidentally that is in Dostoevsky's famous example in The Brothers Karamazov where he poses the question, suppose you could create utopia forever basically, peace on earth forever, but to do so you first have to torture this little child in front of you.

Torture the child to death I think he says, I don't remember exactly.

Mr. Scrooge, I presume. Indeed you do, sir. Scrooge, of course, was a character in Charles Dickens' famous story, A Christmas Carol.

Because it was featured in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest