You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

The human brain is a marvelous sponge that can process 11 million bits of information

every second, but like a sponge, it's leaky.

Our conscious minds, the thoughts we are aware of, can only handle 40 to 50 bits of information

a second, which means that way more is entering our heads than we realize.

There's so much information coming at us.

We can't really process all that information on a very rational, logical manner,

otherwise we would be agonizing over every decision we make.

Pragya Agarwal is a behavioral and data scientist in the UK and looks at this in her new book.

So what's the human brain to do?

Well, Pragya says we sometimes take cognitive shortcuts to help make those decisions easier.

Shortcuts that can lead to implicit bias, or as it's sometimes called unconscious bias,

which is what her books sway is all about.

These are some of the biases or prejudices that we carry within us,

and we might think that we are really fair-minded and egalitarian,

but they often spring up on us when we least expected,

when often when we are tired or distracted or in a hurry,

including, of course, racial bias.

Pragya gave me a short example from her own life,

raised in India, she came to the UK over 20 years ago,

and now lives with her husband and three kids in a beautiful seaside town.

The sandy beach is like 10 minutes away, which is great for the dog,

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