Transcription
What does it mean to be brave? I'm going to show you today why most of us do not understand the nature of bravery and how you can become a more courageous person. We'll draw on the lessons of history from real life accounts of courage and the fascinating neuroscience of what happens in our brains when we are brave.
The philosopher Aristotle described courage as one of his foundational virtues. I have long thought of it as the most important virtue because without courage, how can you stand up for the right thing? How can you pursue your true calling? How can you be a good leader or a good parent or a good friend? All of these involve challenges of courage. One reason we fail at these challenges, we misunderstand the nature of bravery. How can you be brave if you don't know what bravery is?
I want to take you back to April 2017. Trains come and go in the New York City subway. On one platform in the Bronx, two trains come to a stop. Through the doors of one train, someone shoots a video. It shows a woman stuck between the subway doors on the train on the other side of the platform. She holds a bag. Her head is outside the car while her body is caught inside. She stands there motionless, trapped, half in, half out, powerless. The video rolls. One person walks by, moves slowly. Another person comes along, then a third. No one seems to be in a hurry. No one pays any notice to the trapped woman. No one helps her. The camera zooms out, then in. The seconds stick by. It's almost unbearable. You feel like shouting. Do something. Help her.
An Instagram story about the incident posted the video and featured this message: "If you thought you were having a bad day, just be glad this isn't you." There's someone we are not seeing in the video. We're not seeing the person holding the phone. If you see someone in trouble and you are shocked that people are walking by without helping, what does it say about you that you just shoot a video about it?
Now, it turns out that help was on the way. Subway employees were trying to get the doors open. But the video went viral because it spoke to a great fear that we have. In a moment of crisis, when we are desperate, when we are trapped, will people walk by us without bothering to help, without bothering to look? Psychologists sometimes call this the bystander effect. Lots of people can help in a given situation, but no one steps forward. Everyone waits for somebody else to fix the problem. Lots of terrible things in our world happen like this, in plain sight. Many horrors in human history unfold while the world watches and does nothing. A saying that is misattributed to the Irish statesman Edmund Burke goes like this: "All it takes for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
But every now and then we hear a different kind of story. On my podcast, I interviewed a woman named Abigail Marsh. She told me a story. Many years ago, Abigail is in college. She's home for the summer visiting family in Washington State. One night, she goes to Seattle to have dinner with a friend. Around midnight, she starts to drive home to Tacoma on Interstate 5.
>> Yes, it's it's a incredibly busy freeway, very heavily trafficked.
>> As Abigail approaches a crest of the highway, she sees something on the road. Somehow, a dog is running across the freeway. Abigail is an animal lover. She swerves.
>> And unfortunately, I hit it anyways. And the combination of hitting the dog and swerving sharply sent my car into a series of fishtails across several lanes of freeway.
>> The car begins to spin around and around. Abigail is completely helpless. It's a miracle she doesn't hit anyone.
>> until finally it came to a rest in the fast lane of the freeway facing backward into the oncoming traffic just past the crest of the overpass. It was the the most terrified I've ever been in my life. And I remember trying over and over to turn the car back on and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the engine to re-engage.
>> A vehicle comes over the crest of the overpass straight at Abigail. At the very last second, the driver sees her and swerves out of the way. Another car comes over the crest and again swerves at the last moment.
>> And so my car would shake every time these big cars and semis would swerve around it at the last minute. I just knew it was a matter of time until one of them was going to hit me.
Abigail is like that trapped woman in the subway car, except cars are hurtling at her. It's at this point that something surprising happens. A man appears at her passenger side window. He tells her, "Looks like you could use some help." Abigail's first thought is to remember a piece of advice her mom has given her: "Don't let strange men into your car." But as more cars come whooshing over the crest of the overpass, she tells him she does need help. He tells her to move over to the passenger side seat. He waits for a break in the traffic, races around the car, and gets into the driver's seat. He figures out why the car is not starting. It's still in drive. He puts the car into park and the engine starts up. He waits for another break in the traffic, guns the engine, pulls a sharp U-turn on the interstate, and gets to an offramp. His car is parked on the shoulder ahead.
>> Yeah, I remember the sound of his voice as he looked at me. I'm gray. I'm sure. And sweaty and shaking. I felt awful. And he said, "Are you going to be okay? Do you need me to follow you home?" And I said, "No, no, I'm going to be okay. I'll be okay." You know, I wasn't thinking quite straight in the moment. And he said, "Okay, you take care of yourself." And out of the car he got and went back to his own car and drove off into the night. And that is the last I ever saw of him.
Abigail later pieces together what happened. She realizes that the man had probably seen her stuck in the fast lane of the highway as he came driving over the crest of the freeway. In a split second, he decided to pull over and help. In the dead of night, he ran across six lanes of highway to get to her passenger side window. He risked his life a second time as he ran around the car to get into the driver's seat, and then a third time as he gunned the engine and pulled a U-turn to get Abigail to safety. At the point he made the decision to help, he had no idea who Abigail was. She was a stranger. Why had he risked his life three times to save hers?
This question stayed with Abigail as she went on to become a psychologist and a neuroscientist. She became fascinated by people who do brave and kind things for others. She started to study one particular group of extraordinary people, people like Lucia Lloyd. Lucia heard a podcast episode that we did on what are known as nondirected kidney donors. These are people who decide to donate a kidney and not just to a friend or a family member, to a total stranger.
I want to play you a note she sent us because it's one of the best notes we have ever received in the last decade of producing the Hidden Brain podcast. "I really like the things that the episode was saying about how we all want to become more altruistic and I was particularly affected by the person who said that he believed that God put us on this earth to help people and wanted to do what God wanted in helping other people. And I thought that's what I believe too. Maybe the obvious answer to how can I be more like the people who donate their kidney to a stranger is for me to donate my kidney to a stranger. And so I am already getting started on the process. I might very easily be ending up to save somebody's life because of your episode."
Why aren't more of us like Lucia? Well, one clue to that answer is that many of us are like Lucia when it comes to the people we are very close to. If your child or brother or parent needed a kidney to stay alive, wouldn't you donate an organ to save them? But here's the thing. Would you do this for a friend? What about a coworker? What about a stranger? Most of us are affected by a phenomenon known as social discounting. We're very generous to the people who are closest to us, but we become far less generous as our connection to someone becomes a tiny bit more remote.
As Abigail began studying altruistic kidney donors, she found something very, very interesting. They made little distinction between people who were in their innermost circle and people who were strangers. As Lucia said in her note to me, "I think God put us on this earth to help people." Notice she didn't say "God put us on this earth to help the people we are closest to." For people like Lucia, there's not much of a distinction between us and them. Extraordinary altruists think that even people they've never met deserve their kindness and compassion. In fact, when Abigail asked people who were altruistic kidney donors why they were donating their kidney to a stranger, many of them thought the question didn't make sense. They think if you have two kidneys and you could survive just fine with one, which is true, that if another person is going to die unless they get your kidney, the choice to donate to them is the obvious choice. It feels to them so intuitive and so clear that they have trouble understanding why anybody wouldn't make that decision.
Abigail wanted to know if there was something different about the brains of the people who were willing to go to great lengths to help strangers. She conducted brain scans of her altruistic kidney donors and compared them with people who are less altruistic. She found a difference in the region of the brain known as the amygdala. People who are extremely altruistic seem to have larger amygdalas than the rest of us. Why does that matter? Well, one thing the amygdala does is to help us recognize distress in other people. Extreme altruists appear to be more sensitive to the pain of others. Interestingly, psychopaths tend to have smaller amydalas, which makes sense given that they often fail to recognize the distress of other people.
Now, think about the actions of people who rush in to help during a crisis. The ones who dive into a stormy sea to rescue a drowning stranger, who dash into a burning building to save a family trapped inside. These are people who run toward danger when most of us freeze or run away. These extraordinary people are not seeing strangers as strangers. They're seeing them as their own brothers and sisters.
There's a model that many of us carry around in our heads about what it means to be brave. We get this from the TV shows we watch, from the movie stars we admire. But in real life, courage looks very different. Some years ago, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker, was headed home from work. When he got to his block, he saw that his neighbor's house was on fire. His neighbor was screaming that her daughter was trapped inside. Without thinking, the mayor raced into the burning house with his security detail right behind him.
>> Booker plunged into the house, fought his way through the smoke into the bedroom where his neighbor's daughter was barely conscious, flung her over his shoulder, and staggered back through the kitchen, which was engulfed in flames at this point. burning embers are raining down on him and he finally makes it back out of the house uh and collapses into the yard where he was taken by ambulance to the hospital with injuries from smoke inhalation and second-degree burns to his hands.
>> On CBS, Cory Booker was interviewed afterwards. He talked about whether he felt brave as he ran through the burning building.
>> It is a very very scary thing and uh I'd like to say that I at that point I was feeling so courageous but honestly it was terrifying. I couldn't see anything but the flames coming out of the kitchen.
>> Yeah.
>> And I really had this moment where I thought, "Okay, I think this is I think I'm trapped. I think we can't get out."
Cory Booker, who went on to become a senator from New Jersey, doesn't sound like John Wick. He doesn't act like Tom Cruise or Matt Damon. He doesn't sound fearless. And that's the point. In our minds, we have gotten courage and fearlessness confused. When we find ourselves in a difficult situation and we find ourselves frightened, we tell ourselves, "Okay, this means I am not brave because brave people are fearless." I cannot say this strongly enough. That idea is bankrupt. It's simply not true. Courageous people aren't courageous because they are fearless. They're courageous because they have expanded their circle of love. They think of strangers the same way they think of their children or siblings or parents. To me, this is the great lesson of the scientific research into altruism. If you want to be brave, don't ask how you can be less frightened. Ask how you can love more, how you can love better.
I want to tell you a personal story. It doesn't involve physical courage, but it does involve taking a big risk. When I finished college, I received a degree in engineering. I was all set to get my MBA and head off to a life of corporate riches and success. But I happened to get a couple of months off after college, and I spent it working at a local newspaper. I fell in love with journalism and the delight of sharing ideas and explaining things. When I told my parents I was going to chuck my engineering degree and become a journalist, my dad was very worried. He wondered how I would make ends meet. Perhaps I should have been more scared. But at that point, all I could think about was how much I loved interviewing people and writing stories.
As the years rolled on, many people have told me that I was brave to set aside what I had studied in college, to drop that MBA, to take a gamble on a profession that didn't have great employment prospects. But the truth is, I was not being brave. I was just in love with what I was doing. Today, the Hidden Brain podcast receives millions of downloads every month and is featured on more than 400 public radio stations around the United States. In 2025 alone, I visited 16 cities for a live tour. Things have worked out well for me, but it's not because I'm fearless. It's because I found something that was bigger than my fear.
Check out Hidden Brain on Apple or Spotify or wherever you stream audio podcasts and subscribe to this channel for more ideas on how the science of the mind can help you lead a better life. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.