Hey there, Shankar here with some exciting news.
Our live Perceptions Tour is returning this summer in partnership with public radio stations around the country.
This time, we're heading to Northampton, Massachusetts, Burlington, Vermont, Boulder, Colorado,
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Blacksburg, Virginia, San Luis Obispo, California, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
More information is at hiddenbrain.org/tour.
I hope to see you at one of our upcoming stops.
Okay, here's today's show.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Think about a time you flipped through an old family album.
Maybe you paused on a photo of your grandparents as young adults.
Their clothes look outdated.
Their expressions too formal.
Perhaps you imagined what it was like to live in that time and found it impossible.
Or think of a film set in medieval times.
You may have thought, wow, these people lived in a completely different universe.
I have so little in common with them.
It's easy to believe the past is sealed off from us,
that those lives, those cultures, those ways of thinking have vanished from the world.
But is that true?