Learned helplessness

Psychologist Martin Seligman continues his discussion of learned helplessness by examining how people interpret discouraging thoughts and develop a sense of agency. The conversation explores ways of recognizing possibilities and building confidence in the capacity to influence future events. This is the second part of the interview, following the episode published on 21 September 2026.

Psychologist Martin Seligman joins Hidden Brain to discuss learned helplessness and why some people act on opportunities while others believe their actions cannot change outcomes. The conversation examines how interpretations of setbacks influence later behaviour and how optimism can help people recover a sense of agency. Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam and published by Hidden Brain Media on 21 September 2026, this is the first part of How to Make a Difference. The official episode page provides a public audio player.

…Rodent stress models such as Learned Helplessness (LH) and Social Defeat Stress (SDS) have been used to uncover a stressor’s impact on behavior and the underlying brain changes. In LH, mice subjected to inescapable shocks can have inappropriate passive behavior or “helplessness”, or continue to exhibit normal escape behavior- "r

Dr. Rajan and her lab design neural network models based on experimental data, and reverse-engineer them to figure out how brain circuits function in health and disease. They recently developed a powerful framework for tracing neural paths across multiple brain regions— called Current-Based Decomposition (CURBD). This new approach enables the computation of excitatory and inhibitory input currents that drive a given neuron, aiding in the discovery of how entire populations of neurons behave across multiple interacting brain regions. Dr. Rajan’s team has applied this method to studying the neur