The “hidden brain” is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside of our conscious awareness, but that have a decisive effect on how we behave.

The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all of our most complex and important decisions – it decides who we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, or which way to run when someone yells “fire!” It explains why we can become riveted by the story of a single puppy adrift on an ocean but are quickly bored by a story of genocide. The hidden brain can also be deliberately manipulated to vote against someone’s interest, or even to become a suicidal terrorist. But the most disturbing thing is that it can do all of this without our knowing.

Shankar Vedantam, longtime author of the Washington Post‘s popular Department of Human Behavior column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences. Using original reporting that combines the latest scientific research with fascinating narratives that take listeners from the American campaign trail to terrorist indoctrination camps, from the World Trade Center on 9/11 to, yes, a puppy adrift in the Pacific Ocean, Vedantam illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an original argument about how we can compensate for our mental blindness – and what happens when we don’t.