Public Radio 89.5 begins Invisibilia Season 3 on Thursday, June 1, 2017. This four-episode season airs every Thursday in June at 12:00 p.m. and it will be rebroadcast Friday at 8:00 p.m.
Invisibilia is Latin for "invisible things." The program explores the unseen forces that shape human behavior -- things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions -- interweaving narrative storytelling with scientific research that will ultimately make you see your own life differently. The show is co-hosted by a trio of NPR's award-winning journalists, Alix Spiegel, Lulu Miller and Hanna Rosin, who have roots at This American Life, Radiolab and The Atlantic.
Listen to the Season Three trailer HERE.
Season 3 episodes will look at the nature of reality and our role in creating it. The stories speak to a central question of our time: how is it that people are looking out at the same landscape and seeing completely different things? Is this just a unique cultural situation, or is our polarization born of something more profound? Through illuminating science and compelling stories about hidden bias, social bubbles, emotional truth, our future selves, and living with wild bears, Invisibilia will explore to what extent we live in the same world, or a world that each of us constructs.
EPISODE ONE: EMOTION
How real and inevitable are our emotions?
In the first stories of the new season, we’re giving emotions a similar treatment to the one we gave to thoughts in the very first episode of
Invisibilia
(The Secret History of Thoughts). Where do our emotions come from? How seriously should we take them? Do they tell us truths about the world that should guide our behavior or should we be more skeptical about them? To explore these questions, we look at an unusual case in the American justice system. Then we follow a man as he discovers a new emotion that no one in western culture has experienced before.
EPISODE TWO: REALITY CHECK
How real is our own reality?
What happens when people can’t agree on reality? Many in our increasingly polarized society confront this question every day. In this episode we meet Umpires in training who have a lock on what’s really happening and visit a small town in Minnesota, called Eagle’s Nest, that has a unique experience with the reality divide: some of the people in the town believe that wild black bears are gentle animals to be fed and befriended, while many others take a more traditional view on the human-bear relationship. This leads to conflict and, ultimately, a tragic death. Then we meet a young man who is taking extraordinary steps to break himself out of his own reality bubble.
EPISODE THREE:THE OTHER SELF
How does the culture help shape the reality each of us lives in?
In this episode we explore a theory about prejudice that has taken hold in recent years: implicit bias. The rise of this concept was facilitated by the public release of a psychological test that can be done online called the Implicit Association Test, which purports to measure a secret, hidden part of ourselves that most of us can’t directly access: our racism. Although embraced by many as an incredible breakthrough in our understanding of the human psyche, it has also received pushback from groups and individuals who don’t believe that it is accurately measuring bias. In this story we follow the development of the test and theory of implicit bias and talk to several people who are trying to confront and change their other self.
EPISODE FOUR:TRUE YOU
What realities should we entertain for ourselves?
In this episode we pose one of our favorite questions to ask children: What do you want to be when you grow up? Many people have these visions of their future selves; fantasies of a smarter, better, richer, more successful version of the people they are today. In many ways these future selves motivate us, pushing us to improve ourselves as we seek to achieve our dreams. But they can also be dangerous, mocking us for everything we have failed to become. Our stories take us into the life of a Syrian orphan who forged a new identity and life despite all odds and we go to North Port, Florida, where the principal of a high school did something unusual, and pretty extreme, to try and help his students reach their full potential, in an experiment that went horribly wrong. Then we travel to another world entirely; the dream world, where a woman is seeking answers from within.
Excerpts and related original stories will also be featured on Morning Edition and/or All Things Considered on Thursdays throughout the month of June.
You can subscribe to the podcast and catch up on season twoHERE.