Shankar Vedantam is NPR’s social science correspondent and host of the “Hidden Brain” podcast. He was previously a reporter at The Washington Post,where hewrote the Department of Human Behaviorcolumn. Vedantam writes an occasional column for Slate; authored the book,The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives; and writes fiction and plays. He has lectured at Harvard and Columbia, was a senior scholar at the Wilson Center, and has participated in fellowships with Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the World Health Organization, among others. He’s on the advisory board of the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowships in Science and Religion.