Hidden Brain | 5 minute podcast summaries

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Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-brain/id1028908750?i=1000519944167

Other podcast summaries in Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries

In other podcast apps, search 'podcast summaries'.

Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-conversations-go-wrong/id1028908750?i=1000518729286

Or if you're on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries

Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/humor-us/id1028908750?i=1000517806994

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Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-unfinished-lesson/id1028908750?i=1000516856481

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Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/useful-delusions/id1028908750?i=1000515869497

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Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/made-of-honor/id1028908750?i=1000514923012

"In smaller communities, everyone knows your name, but everyone also knows your shame."

Key ideas in this episode: What honour culture is, how smaller communities aren't always safer & how honour leads to polarization

Who is Ryan Brown?

• Managing Director for Measurement at Rice, which focuses on helping people use the right data to answer the right questions.
• Previously a professor of social psychology at The University of Oklahoma, where he taught and conducted research on how people think, feel, and behave.

Idea 1 @ 9mins: 

• Honour cultures are societies that put the defense of reputation at the centre of social life, and make that defense one of their highest priorities.  It's when a person feels obliged to protect his or her reputation by answering insults, and threats, oftentimes through the use of violence, because if you ever back down, you'll be known as the kind of person that can be taken advantage of.   Everyone cares about their reputation to some degree, but honour cultures dial this up, to the extreme.  For Ryan, you want to have some characteristics of honour culture where you're loyal and take care of those around you, but you also don't want to define your worth by living up to the standards of being tough and brave.

Idea 2 @ 10mins: 

• Smaller communities aren't always safer than larger communities.  Often smaller communities are viewed to be more tight knit and safe, because everyone knows each other.   But at the same time, it can be harder & less forgiving, because of the same reason, that everyone knows each other.  When you have some form of public humiliation, it can be hard to do anything about if you're in a rural town or village, if you're in a larger community, you can often adjust by meeting different people.

Idea 3 @ 45mins: 

• In politics, but also in many things in general, we often take a side. And once we've taken a side, there's a tendency to demonize the other side.  They're the bad guys, they're the enemy. If you combine that sort of thinking with the beliefs and values associate with honour culture, that becomes an extra bad combination.   Because we get honour to an extent, by winning and defeating them, and that becomes our motive as opposed to a mutually positive sum relationship with others.

1 question:

Can you think of something you did because of honour?

Other topics:

• The relationship between honour culture and military valor.
• Real life examples of the different levels of honour culture across cultures.
• How honour culture has an impact on suicide rates and crimes.

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Key ideas: How stories can be a safe place for our thoughts, the value of reaction fiction stories & why everyone should journal or write.

1 quote:

• "We are the only animals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and have people believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same stories, we can follow the same rules and cooperate effectively."

Idea 1:

• Stories provide us with a safe space to be able to interact with difficult things such as trauma and repressed feelings.  In our stories, we can do things that we can't do in real life, on a page, we can rewrite stories from our past, we can reframe them, invent new characters, in our stories, we can control what happens.

Idea 2: 

• It seems like the brain regions we employ when we we're understanding stories is the same as the brain regions we employ when we're understanding other people.   By reading or consuming fiction content, we're using the same network of brain regions that we do in the real world to understand people. Allowing us to better understand and empathize with people in reality by reading fictional stories.  Everyone has a story of their life playing in their head, the better we can understand others stories, the better we can interact and connect with these people in real life.

Idea 3: 

• Writing and journalling, is a way to have a conversation with yourself, to better handle and grasp something.  You gain clarity by speaking to someone about something, the same is with speaking to yourself, and writing is a way to have a more in depth conversation with yourself because not everything has to be in your mind at the same time.

1 question:

• Can you think of something where writing down your thoughts can be a helpful way to have a conversation with yourself?

Other topics in the episode:

• First hand account of someone who lost their partner to suicide and how vengeful thoughts were handled through journalling and writing. 
• First hand accounts of a doctor that lost his brother in a car accident right in front of his eyes and how altering a story in his imagination helped with his reality.

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Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-story-of-stories/id1028908750?i=1000513125002

Key ideas: How explaining something is pleasurable, viewing uncertainty as a positive & the issue of distorting facts with stories.

1 quote:

"In the presence of feeling a lack of control, we sometimes seek to impose control by seeing patterns where none exist."

Idea 1 @ 1 minute : 

• How much we like an explanation should have nothing to do with how good it is.  A good explanation gives us pleasure. And when we can't come up with a good explanation, we feel dissatisfied. Something of the human mind yearns to make sense of the world. Some researchers think the sense-making drive is a basic human impulse, no different than thirst or hunger. But the potential risk of this is, because we enjoy finding explanations, we seek them, even if there isn't any there.  At the same time, some explanations are more pleasurable than others, often they feel like they fit better, so they're more enjoyable to contemplate. And if we are drawn to explanations, in part because we derive pleasure from them, it's quite likely that from time to time we're going to draw the more pleasurable conclusion rather than the more accurate one.

Idea 2 @ 26mins: 

• Uncertainty can be both negative, and a positive.  We often find uncertainty as a negative thing. However, we should view uncertainty as an opportunity for us to learn something. That there's something that's worth paying attention to to better understand.

Idea 3 @ 42mins: 

• The ease in which we construct stories can often distract us from the underlying facts.  There was a really influential model of jury decision making called the story model. Where, the idea is that jurors, when hearing the evidence presented to them in the testimonies, are trying to construct a story of what happened.   And the way people decide whether they're going to convict or not is by evaluating which of the different stories being told by the parties is better, and not always the underlying facts.  This can lead to some problematic consequences. One of them is that if you change the order in which people hear testimony. Such that it makes it easier or harder to construct the story that's consistent with the prosecution, for example, that will affect how likely it is that participants think that that story is the right one.  In other words, both the defense and the prosecution, could be presenting the same facts, but one of them is constructing the story of the facts better than the other one. We're more likely to believe the side that presents the better story.  And in this case, what makes it a better story is just the fact that it was presented in the right temporal order in which the events unfolded so that it was easier to construct that story in your mind, even though it's the same facts.

1 question:

• Can you think of something that you tried to find an explanation for where none existed or where it was wrong?

Other topics:

• Simple vs complex explanations, and how we can better see the bigger picture. 
• How we often don't understand things as well as we thought.
• The importance of intentionally explaining and understanding the opposing side.

Or if you're on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries

Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/radically-normal/id1028908750?i=1000512160627

Or if you're on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries

Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-brain-5-min-podcast-summary/id1557583541?i=1000512968779

Or if you're on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries

Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creating-god/id1028908750?i=1000510231458