Listen to Shankar Vedantam on NPR
Most
of us would agree that there’s an obvious connection between the
things we believe and the way we behave. But what if our actions are driven
not by our conscious beliefs but by hidden motivations we’re
not even aware of?
The “hidden brain” is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for
a host of cognitive processes that happen outside our conscious awareness
but that have a decisive effect on how we behave: It decides whom we fall in love with, whether we should convict
someone of murder, and which way to run when someone yells “Fire!”
The hidden
brain can also be deliberately manipulated to convince people to vote
against their own interests, or to even become suicide terrorists. But
the most disturbing thing is that it does all this without our knowing
...
