Hey there, Shankar here. We're working on a bunch of new episodes coming your way beginning next week.

In the meantime, we wanted to highlight an episode from last June that was the result of many months of research and reporting.

Please note it includes the sounds of shootings from a college campus, as well as music with violent and explicit language.

If you're listening with small kids, you may want to save

this one for later. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantham. On a chilly April morning in 2007,

a nightmare unfolded on a college campus in Virginia. A 23-year-old student, acting alone,

opened fire in a dormitory.

He shot and killed two students.

Then he walked across campus and began killing people in an engineering building.

The sound of gunfire was caught on a student's cell phone.

We weren't sure what it was. It was gunshots, but for a while we thought it would have been construction.

We heard this horrible scream and laughter.

Tina Harrison was a student in the building.

So we were sitting in the classroom and basically panic broke out.

All we could hear was people screaming, laughter, and more screaming.

And I counted 24 gunshots within a minute, and I lost track after that. It just started praying.

By the time the assault ended, 32 people were dead. The gunman took his own life.

The shooting at Virginia Tech was quickly seared into our minds as one of the

deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Unfortunately, it's been followed by many other

school shootings, including the killing of 17 students in Parkland, Florida. In all these cases,

the news media has struggled to convey the sheer scale of the massacre.

There is terror and then sorrow today at the campus of Virginia Tech.

...