The Past is Never Dead
5/25/202652 min
How does the culture in which you live shape the life that you lead? We all know that culture affects the languages we speak and the foods we eat. But anthropologist Joseph Henrich says the impact of culture goes even further, reaching into our bodies and our minds. He takes us on a journey through time to show how human cultures create a "collective brain," and how that shared knowledge profoundly shapes who we are and how we live.
Hidden Brain is headed back on the road this summer, for the latest leg of our Perceptions tour! Join Shankar as he shares key psychological insights from the first decade of the show. More information on tour stops and tickets can be found at our tour page.
Episode illustration by Esma Melike Sezer for Unsplash+
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First 90 secondsShankar Vedantam· Host0:00
Hey there, Shankar here with some exciting news. Our live Perceptions tour is returning this summer in partnership with public radio stations around the country. This time, we're heading to Northampton, Massachusetts; Burlington, Vermont; Boulder, Colorado; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Blacksburg, Virginia; San Luis Obispo, California; and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. More information is at hiddenbrain.org/tour. I hope to see you at one of our upcoming stops. Okay, here's today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think about a time you flipped through an old family album. Maybe you paused on a photo of your grandparents as young adults. Their clothes look outdated, their expressions too formal. [gentle music] Perhaps you imagined what it was like to live in that time and found it impossible. Or think of a film set in medieval times. You may have thought, "Wow, these people lived in a completely different universe. I have so little in common with them." It's easy to believe the past is sealed off from us, that those lives, those cultures, those ways of thinking have vanished from the world, but is that true? [gentle music] In