53 min

Discovering your True Identity The Pulse

    • Science

Identity's a complicated thing — a mixture of nurture and nature, ethnicity, gender, culture, conscious decisions, coincidences, and more. In many ways, though, who we think we are boils down to the stories we tell ourselves; stories based on our origins, our families, and how we came to be.But what happens when those stories change? When we discover that the narrative of our lives is completely different from what we've always believed?

On this episode, we explore stories of identity, and what happens when long-buried secrets are uncovered. We hear about a journalist who discovered that his father wasn't who he thought he was, one woman's search for her childhood self in the records of a long-running experiment, and how a fateful medical decision changed the future of a baby born in 1986.

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Identity's a complicated thing — a mixture of nurture and nature, ethnicity, gender, culture, conscious decisions, coincidences, and more. In many ways, though, who we think we are boils down to the stories we tell ourselves; stories based on our origins, our families, and how we came to be.But what happens when those stories change? When we discover that the narrative of our lives is completely different from what we've always believed?

On this episode, we explore stories of identity, and what happens when long-buried secrets are uncovered. We hear about a journalist who discovered that his father wasn't who he thought he was, one woman's search for her childhood self in the records of a long-running experiment, and how a fateful medical decision changed the future of a baby born in 1986.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

53 min

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