This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

I felt like I had lost touch with who I was.

That I was somebody else. I was my shadow side or something.

I don't know.

Have you ever felt as if someone else was writing your story,

controlling what you do, shaping how you act?

Usually when this happens,

the currents that hold us captive come from the outside world.

But sometimes external forces can be amplified by the currents inside our own minds,

the rules that we've been taught, the mandates that we've internalized.

This week on Hidden Brain is surreal story about a very strange con

and the scripts inside our heads.

I mean, I became a stranger.

I was like a hypnotized person. I wasn't me and yet I was.

Growing up, Jane Mikkelson's father had a peculiar way of getting Jane and her brother

to mine their manners at the dinner table.

If one of us put an elbow on the table while we were eating,

there was a long metal strap under the table that my father could reach very easily

from sitting at the head of the table and he would pluck it with his thumb

like a big guitar string and the whole table would resonate with this tone.

And when we were very little, we thought it was magic.

What was this ringing sound supposed to indicate?

...