Shankar Vedantam

I’m the creator and host of Hidden Brain, a podcast and public radio show about the unseen forces that shape how we think and behave. It began at NPR in 2015, where I was the social science correspondent for nine years; since 2020 I’ve produced it independently through Hidden Brain Media.

Before NPR I spent a decade at The Washington Post, where a column on human behavior led to my 2010 book, The Hidden Brain. I studied electronics engineering in India and journalism at Stanford, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Ask me about the mental shortcuts you don’t know you’re taking.