As a society, we still maintain many ancient traditions and practices relating to the care of our dead. We invest tremendous resources and energy in maintaining cemeteries and sacred ground for the…
The mind’s ability to envision more than what is physically present in the world is an astounding fact of life. We’re always imagining, thinking, and living in our heads. Our thoughts and our…
Teaching seems pretty straightforward: one person knows something better than someone else and teaches it to them. But there’s something important that happens to the teacher themselves. In this…
When you lose something, there’s an emptiness, a hole, where that something used to be. And you have to figure out a way to keep living your life with that loss. Even though the emptiness will always…
Nearly three decades ago, Psychologist James Pennebaker discovered a shocking correlation between secrets and health outcomes - that people who kept more secrets were dealing with more health issues.…
We’ve come to think of healing in mechanical terms, as repairing something broken, like fixing a flat tire. But for most of human history healing has meant more than repairing the body. Healing has…
In this show, we are talking about a very special kind of belief—belief in something. Often considered a defining human characteristic, like language, belief shapes our lives. We put our confidence in…
Promises can be made about almost anything. From promising to be a knight of God, to promising to talk about sex... to promising to stay together until death do us part. In this show, eight different…
In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of Jordan Hall, the psychology building at Stanford. Mentally healthy college students were randomly assigned the roles of prisoner…
Today, we generate data with every mouse click, phone call, and even every breath. This week on State of the Human, you'll hear about how an 18th century historian, a poet, a computer scientist, a…
