Meet Your Brain

Your brain knows different things than you think it does. Prejudice, bias and a number of other traits that we consciously decry may be more hard-wired in our subconscious than we think.

Shankar Vedantam, author of the Washington Post's "Department of Human Behavior" column, has taken a look at the scientific study of subconscious actions. Vedantam says that sexism, prejudice and other behaviors are deeply ingrained, sometimes in opposition to what we say we believe. But yet Vedantam says when people say they are not prejudiced, they aren't lying. They just don't really know what their brain thinks...

LISTEN: SHANKAR VEDANTAM - THE HIDDEN BRAIN

The Web and Deep Thinking

Is Google making us stupid? That's the question that Nicholas Carr introduced with his Atlantic Magazine cover story in 2008.

In search of the answer, Carr looked into the science of how our brain processes information. He also looked into the history of how media has changed language and learning.

The result of his research, THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS, makes the case that deep thinking may be on the way out as new media usage is going up.

LISTEN: NICHOLAS CARR - THE SHALLOWS

Explaining Your Mistakes

The human brain is an amazing machine. The organ allows us to breathe, digest and -- after some practice -- engage in complicated procedures like driving a car without giving it much active thought. The trade-off for the operation of your amazing brain is that some seemingly illogical anomalies pop up. We call those anomalies mistakes.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joseph Hallinan has examined the neurological and psychological factors that play a role in our mistake-making. In his book WHY WE MAKE MISTAKES, Hallinan reveals that we make mistakes because, sometimes we can't help it and other times because we'd rather make a mistake than accept the truth.

LISTEN: JOSEPH HALLINAN - WHY WE MAKE MISTAKES