Shankar Vedantam

how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives

The hidden brain

Nick Gracilla

Hidden Brain is among my favorite podcasts. It is a well-produced collection of stories, all aimed at uncovering how unconscious patterns drive decision making, behavior, and relationships. They tend to be curious, insightful, and overall quite positive — some of the best work in economic reasoning. 

That is not this book, written in 2009. Here you'll find the darkest recesses of the hidden brain, in harrowing, disturbing tales of implicit bias, racism, sexism, the power of group decision making, the power of the psychology of small groups — which drives suicide bombers — and terribly sad chapters on 9/11 and the public murder of Deletha Word, killed on the Belle Isle bridge in Detroit. Here, you'll come face to face with the sad reality of how our brains work: how hidden biases exaggerate our attention to the new, the terrifying, and the malevolent, but ignore the painfully more obvious everyday risks and challenges. We'll move heaven and hell to change outcomes for those we know, while readily ignoring mass suffering and death. 

If there is any bright note here, it's that becoming conscious of the reality of our brain and its hidden biases helps us to create guardrails against them, to better understand where our attitudes, beliefs, and facts are rooted, and to improve our rational and moral decision making. But there's not much here in this book to further that, which is far better handled in the podcasts. 

Read this, not for cheery insights or quirky tales, but to understand that the shadow brain on the cover is a threat, and a struggle, in our efforts to act well and live in a good and just society.

The hidden brain how our unconscious minds elect presidents, control markets, wage wars, and save our lives

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