Hidden Brain

Shankar Vedantam is the host and executive editor of the Hidden Brain podcast and radio show. Hidden Brain receives millions of downloads per month, and is heard on more than 400 public radio stations across the United States. Vedantam has explored the science of human behavior for more than three decades. He was NPR’s social science correspondent between 2011 and 2020, and he spent 10 years as a reporter at The Washington Post. From 2007 to 2009, he was the Post's Department of Human Behavior columnist. Vedantam and Hidden Brain have been recognized with the Edward R Murrow Award, and honors from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Webby Awards, the American Public Health Association, and the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship. In 2009-2010, Vedantam served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Vedantam is the author of The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives, published in 2010, and co-author of Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain published in 2021.