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Hidden Brain – NPR

On: Art Curious, Season 1, Episode 2

Length: Episodes between 30 minutes and one hour

Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast app or streaming service

With almost 300 episodes, Hidden Brain is a veteran public radio show that began as a Slate column by the same name. Using a question as the starting point for each episode, host Shankur Vedantam and his team draw on science and storytelling to reveal the invisible patterns of human behaviour. The magic of this show is how it makes complex academic research accessible to a wider audience without dumbing down any of the content. Vedantam doesn’t shy away from tackling the big questions: Why is marriage so hard? How do we get unstuck? What makes us successful? To these he offers nuanced answers that help us understand ourselves and others a little better.

The Happiness Lab with Dr Laurie Santos – Pushkin Industries

Length: Two seasons, 10 episodes per season, 30 minutes per episode

Listen on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast app or streaming service

Underpinning The Happiness Lab are insights from Dr Laurie Santos’s popular Yale course, “Psychology and the Good Life”. In this podcast, as in the class, Santos bridges the gap between academic research and applicable lessons for everyday life. With help from Pushkin Industries that brought us Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, this show combines narrative storytelling with interviews to create a podcast that goes beyond the typical two-way interview format that dominates the health and wellness genre.

This makes for an engaging listen that relies on a story to bring the data to life. Whether she’s talking about money, jobs or the perfect holiday, Santos busts the myths that any single thing can bring us happiness.

This is an important intervention in a field promising deceptively quick fixes.

But don’t despair, there are plenty of practical and achievable tips contained in this show.