For this week’s Please Explain, the Leonard Lopate Show finds out how we process all the sounds we hear every day—from the hum of the heater to the wail of sirens to music to speech—and how it shapes our brains and behavior.

Jaimal Yogis, journalist and author of The Fear Project: What Our Most Primal Emotion Taught Me About Survival, Success, Surfing . . . and Love, explores the science of fear through his own attempt to deal with his own.

→Event: Jaimal Yogis will be "in conversation" with psychiatrist Dr. Srini Pillay at The Rubin Museum on Feb.9. Ticket information here.

Share your overcoming-fear moment: What have you done, despite the fact it terrified you? Was it worth it?  Call us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or post your comment here.

We kick things off with one of the longest-running experiments in the world. As Joshua Foer explains, the Pitch Drop Experiment is so slow, you can watch it for hours (check out the live cam) and not detect the slightest movement. But that doesn't mean ...

Our habits—good and bad—shape our lives, and understanding how habits work is key to losing weight, being more productive, exercising regularly, and achieving success.

More Leonard Lopate Show book club

Has this ever happened to you? Things are going great in a relationship. And then, you find out that your significant other loves music that you hate. Or doesn't understand your taste in music at all. Or is really critical of the music that you enjoy. And suddenly, dating that person just doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore.

For a recent live event at The Greene Space in New York, Studio 360 teamed up with The Story Collider to present a night of true stories about memory and the brain. Or “true-ish,” as Kurt Andersen says — as we all know (and science confirms), the act of remembering is not only subjective ...

Meehan Crist is the Writer in Residence in Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and she’s working on a book about traumatic brain injury. Her obsession with the topic started close to home, when her mother suffered a concussion and began forgetting things — all kinds of things: where ...

Video: Meehan Crist on Memory

On Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, the entire country stands at attention to observe a moment of silence. Everyone, that is, except for Daniela Schiller’s father, who sips coffee and reads the paper. Schiller’s attempts to talk with her father about his experiences in the ...

Video: Daniela Schiller on Memory

Maria Konnikova, journalist, psychologist and author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, uses the fictional account of the super-detective's reasoning skills to explore the real-world science of improving cognitive function.

→Event:  Maria Konnikova will be reading from Mastermind on Monday, January 7, starting at 7:00pm at Book Court,

→Event: On Wednesday, January 16 at noon, Maria will be at 92Y Tribeca, where she will be reading, talking, conducting an audience Q&A and signing copies of her new book, tickets can be purchased here.   

Radiolab's latest smart-crush: Molly Webster runs into a neuroscientist who elaborates on our unappreciated sense of hearing and she has to tell somebody about it...

Understanding How the Mind Makes Meaning | The Reading Brain | Your Brain on Sound | The Real Science of Erasing Your Brain | The Future of the Brain

Ray Kurzweil, technologist and futurist who is on a mission to make us all immortal. According to Kurzweil, technology is progressing at a faster and faster rate so that in 10 or 15 years cancer may not exist and aging may be reversible.  His newest book is called “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.”

Our brains evolved in survivalist terms, prioritizing basic sensory functions, like sight and scent. Today, our brains must adapt to learn much more complex processes, like learning to read, as Maryanne Wolfe, the Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, explains. 

What happens in our brains when we hear language, or speak it? In addition to our brains, what other parts of our bodies are at work, trying to relay and understand meaning? And how does all of this inform the way we interact with phones, computers, and non-human language systems? These are all questions that cognitive science professor Benjamin Bergen contemplates in his work at the University of California – San Diego, and in his new book, "Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning."

Dr. Robert Cantu, chief of neurosurgery and director of the Service of Sports Medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, MA and the co-author of Concussions and Our Kids: America's Leading Expert on How to Protect Young Athletes and Keep Sports Safe ,discusses efforts being made to protect children from sports-related head injuries. 

Jad starts us off with some wishful parental thinking: that no matter how many billions of lines of genetic code, or how many millions of years of evolution came before you, your struggles, your efforts, matter -- not just in a touchy feely kind of way, but in ways that ...

A recent study shows that even limited childhood musical training can improve brain functions in adulthood.