Why are we humans so easy to deceive?

What are the tricks of the trade, and how can we train ourselves to be more aware of these?

And what does any of this have to do with Theranos or forging letters or the shell game?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, I examine the intersection between our brains and our lives.

And today's episode is about deception.

You presumably wouldn't do something to cheat a stranger out of $20. So why are there people who would

do that? And what can we do to be a little more thoughtful and aware and immune against deception?

So in a previous episode, I talked about a really impactful event when I was a neuroscience graduate

student, getting my PhD. I was a second year student in the department. And this new young woman

came in as a first year student. We'll call her Tanya. And everyone could see that Tanya was great.

She had great grades, top standardized test scores, terrific letters of

recommendation. And in the interviews, she even won over my graduate advisor who was famously

spiky towards people. And I tell her full story in episode 16, but the short version is that

she faked everything on her graduate school application.

She faked the school transcript and the GRE scores and the letters of recommendation.

And she was only caught because an administrator at the school was so impressed with her

that she decided to call the professors who had written

the letters of recommendation to ask how they'd produced a student like Tanya. And that's how the whole

house of cards came tumbling down. Now, for those of you who listened to episode 16, you'll remember

that Tanya's story then got much weirder because she went to Yale University

and tried to pull exactly the same trick. And when she was caught there, they put her in jail.

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