The author, Shankar Vedantam, is the host of the popular NPR
program by the same name. He started looking into what he termed the hidden
brain when he became curious about many decisions that people made that just
didn't make rational sense. He, like everyone else, assumed that we make our
best decisions by relying upon our rational mind. He sensed that this was not accurate
description of the procedure by which we
make all of our decisions and he sought to investigate the process by which we
make our decisions. He dug into the psychological literature to get at all the
existing research on biases and reasons why we usually don’t call upon our conscious
or rational brain. The resulting book is
a treasure trove of studies and anecdotes that goes to prove his points.
Interestingly, this book came out in 2010, before Daniel
Kahneman published his tome: Thinking: Fast and Slow and well before David Epstein
published Range in 2019. They all investigated the same phenomenon albeit with
different means. Vedantam is a journalist, as is Epstein, and Kahneman is a
Nobel Prize winning economist. Both Vedantam and Epstein called upon the
research of others to draw their conclusions whereas Kahneman had been
conducting his own research with Amos Tversky for decades.
Vedantam talks about the conscious brain versus the hidden
brain when digs in deeper into the research on the subconscious biases and
irrational conclusions that we draw when making quick decisions. Kahneman and
Epstein uses Kahneman and Tversky terms of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Indeed,
conscious brain can is the System 2 and the Hidden brain is the System 1.
Vedantam establishes his argument in the first two chapters
of the book and then he delves into the studies that he had gathered in the
succeeding chapters. He pairs the findings with great stories which integrates
nicely with his arguments and each chapter is an enjoyable read which serves a
greater purpose: to show the perniciousness of the biases which dominates our
hidden brain. He ultimately draws some interesting conclusions in Chapter 10,
where he tries to bring everything together.
I probably should have known about this book earlier, as I
would have read it before I was exposed to the works of the others. Remarkably,
The Hidden Brain has withstood the test of rapidly changing knowledge and
research into the unconscious mind and still tells a great set of stories which
shows us that our decision making prowess is indeed affected by our hidden
biases, more importantly, other people, people in positions of authority or in
a position to affect lives are also affected by the hidden brain. What is
worse, they are not aware about how their hidden brain affects their decisions,
or they just don’t care.
