The hidden brain
Most of us would agree that there's a clear--and even obvious--connection between the things we believe and the way we behave. But what if our actions are driven not by our conscious values and beliefs but by hidden motivations we're not even aware of?The "hidden brain" is Shankar Vedantam's shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside our conscious awareness but have a decisive effect on how we behave. The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all our most complex and important decisions: It decides whom we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, and which way to run when someone yells "Fire!" It explains why we can become riveted by the story of a single puppy adrift on the ocean but are quickly bored by a story of genocide. The hidden brain can also be deliberately manipulated to convince people to vote against their own interests, or even become suicide terrorists. But the most disturbing thing is that it does all this without our knowing.Shankar Vedantam, author of The Washington Post's popular "Department of Human Behavior" column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences.
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What Hacker News says
- The NPR/TED school of (audio) stories is really 'audio clickbait' for audiences with short attention spans and lower barriers to clicking away/skipping/changing the channel/losing interest; unlike book or print readers who already have more sunk cost. Moreover the audio clickbait school often cater to a middle-class, college-graduate audience; and their predilections (dating, career, social issues). It would be a brave person who would talk to that audience about (say) their passion for taking their kid hunting.
Not every concept needs to be sold welded to an anecdote, and not every anecdote needs to dominate the piece, not every anecdote must be happy or even self-complete, and not every story needs to be affirming inspiration porn.
One TEDSalon piece that really hits all these low notes of over-the-top self-congratulation success porn is Amy Webb's "How I hacked online dating" (TEDSalon NY2013 [1]), which boils down to merely combining a few fairly obvious pragmatic quantitative steps then drowning it all in unnecessary gallons of aw-shucks sentimentality and humblebragging and missteps (10:14..15:53). It's important to stop and introspect if/whether/why we're more likely to click on/listen to a title "How I hacked online dating" instead of "How to find someone genuinely compatible with you, in online dating", and if so to fight that tendency. Webb only really ends the preamble at 07:10 of a talk that's 17:14 long. Her thesis is 7:28-7:57. 11:23 is just overkill, can reverse-engineer these things just by asking other people what profiles they swipe on.
It really is time to take out the Gatling gun on the overuse of audio clickbait, or at least the people pushing its worst traits to 'maximize engagement', which oftentimes means spinning a 30-second truism into 10/15/20/30/60 minutes, which is diluting the density of concepts by 20-100x. Brevity shouldn't be a crime, either, although for advertising-supported media it is.
On NPR: Ira Glass is good, and 'The Moth' Story Hour is often pretty good, but then again 'Hidden Brain' with Shankar Vedantam is also good, in a more dry way that doesn't need to pile-drive emotional anecdotes to establish interest.
As to Kamphey, it feels like does have something to tell under it all, but his Medium post is laboring in very stilted LinkedIn 'broetry' (short staccato sentences, rhetorical questions, smug, sometimes infantile narrative). It's not thoughtcrime to have a thought that spans an entire paragraph, old-school, >300 characters.
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_datin...
- Hidden Brain, by Shankar Vedantam & team: hiddenbrain.org
- Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely
The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars by Shankar Vedantam
The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
Idea Man: A Memoir by Paul Allen
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
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