Book Report: The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedadtam (C)2010

The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam (C)2010

Background Information: From his Wiki page: "Vedantam was a participant in the 2002–2003 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship, the 2003–2004 World Health Organization Journalism Fellowship, and the 2005 Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship on Science and Religion. He was a 2009–2010 Nieman Fellow. He worked at The Washington Post from 2001 to 2011, writing its "Department of Human Behavior" column from 2007 to 2009. He then wrote an occasional column called "Hidden Brain" for Slate. Vedantam published The Ghosts of Kashmir in 2005, a collection of short stories discussing the divide between Indians and Pakistani.
In 2010, Vedantam published the book entitled The Hidden Brain. The Edward R. Murrow Award winner focuses on how people become influenced by their unconscious biases. The book incorporates his experiences working as a reporter at the Washington Post. This nonfiction book showcases a range of real life examples on how their biases affect their mental health, including nine chapters discussing situations that affect unconscious biases.
Vedantam hosts the social sciences podcast also called Hidden Brain, where he "reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, the biases that shape our choices, and the triggers that direct the course of our relationships."  You can read the whole thing here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shankar_Vedantam 

You may wonder why a mainstream, Edwin R. Murrow Award winning book is being included in my series of book reports on esoteric and nearly forgotten works of mind science and mumbo jumbo. Simple, it's a really good book, and if you like the other stuff, you'll probably love this book too!
It's a very readable, fast paced book all about cognitive biases and the subconscious mind and how these things influence what we think are our conscious decisions. 

For Vedantam, the hidden brain is the subconscious mind, and one of it's main purposes is to jump to conclusions, and to do it based on heuristics, a sort of simple, logical formula for making decisions. Trouble is, while practical, those decisions are not always right and we're left wondering "why did I do that?"

 All his discussions are backed by well described scientific research and he illuminates how things like familiarity and similarity can cloud our decision making process, He explores racial and gender biases, group psychology, 

Much of the book explores how these unconscious processes are involved in issues that concern us in big ways. Sexism and racism, of course, but also the processes by which some people become extremists or terrorists, and mob mentality, and what does and doesn't work in combating that. 

There's a lot more in the book, and it's all thought provoking and practical to know, since it happens to big populations and also to us one-on-one. A lot of it can also bee seen in current events today, so this book can help make sense of it. 

I can't help but not that this book makes a great companion to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which also explores the science and psychology of unconscious decisions.

If you like mind science you can use, be sure to check out Vedantam's podcast: https://hiddenbrain.org/