Pain feels like a simple message from the body. If your elbow hurts, there must be something wrong with your elbow. If your back is painfully stiff, you need some work done on your back. But psychologist Rachel Zoffness says our minds play a much larger role in our experience of pain than many of us realize. This week, we look at what's really happening when we experience pain, and how a better understanding of this process can open up new possibilities for treatment and healing.
In our companion conversation for Hidden Brain+ subscribers, Rachel Zoffness goes deeper into techniques that can help to reduce our brains' sensitivity to pain. You can hear that episode, which is called "Plastic Brain, Changeable Brain," with a free seven-day trial to Hidden Brain+. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain to access your trial subscription.
For more Hidden Brain ideas and insights, be sure to check out our new YouTube channel! And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
This is an abbreviated version of Checkup's topic on the high cost of wedding season. Canadians face wedding costs between 30,000 to 42,000 according to WeddingWire Canada and The Knot. As guests and couples feel financial pressure, an expert explains how to navigate difficult conversations when celebrations push the limits of what people can afford.
Canadians face wedding costs between 30,000 to 42,000 according to WeddingWire Canada and The Knot. As guests and couples feel financial pressure, an expert explains how to navigate difficult conversations when celebrations push the limits of what people can afford.
From scoring exclusive seats, to dealing with scams, resellers, and rising prices, buying live concert tickets is becoming a bit of a gamble these days. Canadians share their ultimate concert stories, and when they've felt ripped off in the process. Plus, CBC's Dave Seglins shares tips on how to avoid scams and predatory practices.
This ICYMI episode takes you back to 2003 when the Rolling Stones headlined a massive concert in Toronto famously dubbed SARS-stock. It was staged to raise money for healthcare and hospitality workers as Toronto recovered from a deadly outbreak. Nearly 500,000 fans came and the show was broadcast across the country. On August 3rd 2003, Checkup callers weighed in on what they thought of the concert benefit.
In an episode we first ran back in 2019, we explore how a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets.
Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” is the perfect non-denial denial. It’s such a perfect deflection that it seems like it’s been around forever, but reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s and the surprising origin story of what’s now known as a “Glomar Response.” With help from David Sharp and Walt Logan, we tell the story of a clandestine CIA operation to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor and the dilemma they faced when the world found out about it. It’s an episode we first released in 2014, but given some things in the news recently, it resonated with us again.
In the 40 years since that operation, the Glomar Response has become boilerplate language from an array of government agencies. With help from ProPublica editor Jeff Larson and NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, we explore the implications of this ultimate information dodge. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer explains how it stymies oversight, and we learn that, even 40 years later, governmental secrecy can be emotionally painful.
More information about Glomar:
After 40 years, many of the details of Project Azorian are only now coming to light. The US government’s default position has been to keep as much of it classified as possible. It took three years for retired CIA employee David Sharp to get permission to publish his account of Project Azorian. And FOIA played an indirect role in that, as Cold War historians got the CIA to release, in redacted form, an internal history of the mission. After that and a threat of legal action, Sharp was finally able to publish his manuscript in 2012.
We mentioned conspiracy theories that have swirled around Project Azorian filling the void where official silence has reigned. One of them is promulgated in the 2005 book “Red Star Rogue” by Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond. They posit that the K-129 was taken over by rogue Stalinist KGB agents in order to start a nuclear conflict. But the conflict was to be between the US and China, as, according to the authors, the sub had powers to disguise its sonic signature as a Chinese Navy vessel.
This book is the basis of the 2013 drama “Phantom,” which features Ed Harris and David Duchovny as Soviet military officers who sip vodka in a very un-Russian way.
Russian Naval historians, like Nikolai Cherkashin, are not only insulted by this take on the cause of the K-129’s demise, they say the true cause is much easier to pinpoint: They say an American vessel, possibly the USS Swordfish, collided with the Soviet submarine.
Despite the fact that the US government has turned over many documents about Project Azorian and what it found to the Russian government, many in the Russian Navy stand by their theory that it was far too easy for the US to locate the K-129 on the bottom of the Pacific, given the technology of the time. According to these theories, Project Azorian was nothing more than an elaborate cover-up disguised as ... an elaborate cover-up. We can neither confirm nor deny that we exactly understand how that would have worked in practice or execution.
It’s one of the more solemn moments of the Cold War, and one that the Glomar Response helped keep a secret for a very long time.LATERAL CUTS:What Lies Beneath (https://radiolab.org/podcast/what-lies-beneath)
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Julia Barton
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Like tens of millions of people, Stephen Dubner thought he had a penicillin allergy. Like the vast majority, he didn’t. This misdiagnosis costs billions of dollars and causes serious health problems, so why hasn’t it been fixed? We find out in this update of a 2025 episode.
SOURCES:
Kimberly Blumenthal, allergist-immunologist and researcher at the Mayo Clinic.
Theresa MacPhail, associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Thomas Platts-Mills, professor of medicine at the University of Virginia.
Elena Resnick, allergist and immunologist at Mount Sinai Hospital.
RESOURCES:
Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World, by Theresa MacPhail (2023).
"Evaluation and Management of Penicillin Allergy: A Review," by Erica S. Shenoy, Eric Macy, and Theresa Rowe (JAMA, 2019).
"The Allergy Epidemics: 1870–2010," by Thomas Platts-Mills (The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2016).
"Randomized Trial of Peanut Consumption in Infants at Risk for Peanut Allergy," by George Du Toit, Graham Roberts, et al. (The New England Journal of Medicine, 2015).
EXTRAS:
"The Freakonomics Radio Guide to Getting Better," series by Freakonomics Radio (2026).
"Doctors Know They Prescribe Too Many Antibiotics. Why Don’t They Stop?" by Freakonomics, M.D. (2022).
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First up on the podcast, we continue our coverage of the fallout from cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), this time focusing on how one of the largest recipients of aid is coping 18 months later. Contributing Correspondent Catherine Offord talks about her trip to Malawi and the efforts to strengthen their health infrastructure in the wake of funding shocks.
Next on the show, Collin Cherubim, Ph.D. candidate in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at Harvard University, discusses what it means to find helium escaping from the atmosphere of a rocky planet in the habitable zone of a nearby red dwarf.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
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