Hidden Brain

New to Hidden Brain? Here's a great place to start. hiddenbrain.org/featured-episo…

“That colleague was not saying, ‘don't be gay.’ He was saying, ‘It's fine for you to be gay and say that you're gay...but don't flaunt it.”

Have you ever hidden away a part of yourself because you were afraid you wouldn’t be accepted? This week, we discuss the phenomenon of “covering.”

open.spotify.com/episode/6Vm7KK…

“Make sure that you soften it—mute it, edit it downplay it—so that other people around you can feel more comfortable.”

Have you ever downplayed some part of your identity? This week, we talk with legal scholar @kenji_yoshino about what happens when we soften or edit our true selves.

Then, on Your Questions Answered, Yoshino returns to respond to your questions about the pressures we face to hide or downplay parts of who we are.

Over the last 200 years, there's been a profound shift in the way people find partners.

Instead of having our families or social groups pick the people we marry, we go scouting for soulmates ourselves. We pore over photographs in dating apps, scroll through social media to gauge if we share the same tastes in movies and music, and quiz mutual friends. The idea is, we know what will make us happy, and we want someone who checks all our boxes.

But psychologist Paul Eastwick has some bad news: Your intuitions about what you want from a romantic partner are not always reliable. apple.co/4izCdUN

Most of us have ideas about what we’re looking for in a romantic partner. Psychologist Paul Eastwick finds that those preferences are surprisingly poor guides for finding the person we'll choose as a partner. He explains why attraction is so difficult to predict, and how compatibility can grow as two people get to know each other. open.spotify.com/episode/1guse2…