Hidden Brain is one of the best podcasts I am listening to right now (and prompted me to make a podcasts page).

“Hidden Brain helps curious people understand the world – and themselves. Using science and storytelling, Hidden Brain reveals the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, and the biases that shape our choices.”

” Hidden Brain links research from psychology and neurobiology with findings from economics, anthropology, and sociology, among other fields. The goal of Hidden Brain isn’t merely to entertain, but to give you insights to apply at work, at home and throughout your life. “

About Hidden Brain

In a recent Hidden Brain episode, the podcast’s host Shankar Vedantam explores empathy. You can listen to it here. The whole episode is great but what caught my attention was Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 Domestic tension performance. He confines himself for a month to an art gallery room and sets up a paintball gun with a webcam.

The movement of the gun and the trigger can be controlled remotely. By the end of the month Waffa Bilal is shot 60,000 times by anonymous people from more than 130 countries. Some people started to protect him by forming a “virtual human shield” – taking turns in operating the gun and steering it away from the human target.

He wrote a book about the project: “Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun“.