Psychology episodes
27 episodes so far
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21 min
All Eyes on You: The Science of Stage Fright and Choking Under Pressure
Why being watched can feel like being hunted, and how performers learn to carry the fear onto the stage
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20 min
In Sync: How Fireflies, Heartbeats and Human Brains Fall into Rhythm
Why hearts beat together, crowds move as one, and synchronization may be the deepest law of social life
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Free
18 min
Worthy Opponents: How Rivalry Pushes Humans to Excel
Why the presence of others, real or imagined, transforms what we believe we are capable of achieving
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19 min
The Moral Instinct: Where Our Sense of Right and Wrong Comes From
What babies, chimpanzees and the trolley problem reveal about the feeling that something is wrong, and whether to trust it
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20 min
Finding Our Way: How the Brain Builds Its Inner Map
From Polynesian star maps to GPS dependency, how navigation developed our thinking
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13 min
Wounds Without Scars: How the Science of Trauma Rewrote the Story of the Mind
From shell shock to neuroscience, how suffering became the key to understanding consciousness itself
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20 min
The Mind's Eye: How Imagination Became the Brain's Most Powerful Tool
Inside the mind's simulation engine, and why the ability to picture what isn't real changed everything
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19 min
Dancing Plagues and Witch Hunts: The Strange Power of Mass Hysteria
When a group of people believe the same impossible thing, and the world changes because of it
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14 min
The Ledger in Your Head: How Mental Accounting Shapes Who We Are
Why humans instinctively keep score, and how that habit quietly shapes every decision we make
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16 min
Watch and Learn: How Humans Learned to Learn from Each Other
The surprising science and history behind humanity's most underrated superpower: imitation
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25 min
Into the Crowd: The Science of How People Behave in Numbers
Why crowds think, panic, vote and create in ways no individual ever could
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17 min
Mind Reading: The Everyday Science of Knowing What Others Think
Why a four-year-old can do what no chimpanzee can, and what happens in the brain when we guess what others believe
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15 min
Gut Feelings: How the Brain Makes Decisions Before You Know It
What a firefighter's hunch, a chess master's glance and a doctor's snap judgment reveal about the unconscious mind
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19 min
The Dopamine Merchants: The Business of Engineered Craving
Monkeys whose brains fired before the juice arrived, rats that pressed hardest when rewards came at random, and the feed you pull down one more time
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22 min
The Emotional Machine: Two Thousand Years of the Science of Persuasion
Why Aristotle counted emotion among the three ways to win an argument, how Freud's nephew sold cigarettes as freedom, and who chose the defaults you never chose
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15 min
Wired for Fear: Why an Ancient Alarm Keeps Going Off in Modern Life
Where anxiety comes from and why it has surged in our lifetimes: tracing humanity's most misunderstood emotion
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15 min
The Last Speakers: What Happens When a Language Dies
Inside the race to document the world's vanishing tongues — and what we lose with every silence
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10 min
The Gift of Forgetting: Why Your Brain Is Built to Lose Memories
How the mind's talent for erasing the past may be its greatest hidden superpower
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12 min
The Grammar of Games: What Play Does for Growing Brains
A five-thousand-year-old board game, bear cubs that played their way to survival, and what children lose when every hour is scheduled
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15 min
The Science of Awe: Why Humans Are Wired to Feel Small
How a single profound emotion reshapes the brain, bonds communities, and drives our hunger for meaning
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16 min
The Intelligence of Emotions: Why Feeling Is Part of Thinking
What a patient who lost his feelings taught neuroscientists about how we reason, remember and decide
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16 min
The Mind's Eye: Why We See What the Brain Expects
A blind spot you have never noticed, a dress that split the internet, and patients who cannot see motion or recognize a face
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13 min
The Forgotten Art of Mnemonics: Unlocking the Human Memory Palace
Explore how ancient memory techniques can supercharge modern minds.
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15 min
Summoning the Muse: The Psychology of Creative Inspiration
Unraveling the science, mystery, and myths behind sudden moments of creative genius
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11 min
The Shadow World of Sleep: Why Do We Dream?
Every night, as darkness settles and your consciousness fades, you enter one of the most mysterious theaters on Earth
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11 min
Echoes of the Mind: The Symphony of Sound and the Human Experience
Close your eyes for a moment and listen
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13 min
The Mechanics of Memory: Why We Remember, Forget and Rewrite the Past
What a humble sea slug revealed about how memories are made, and why even your clearest ones may not be what they seem
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.