Shankar Vedantam

You've talked about some shocking research into how much information people hide from their own doctors.

Yeah, and someone is trying to quit smoking, for example, and their doctor has been urging them to quit smoking for a number of years, but they've in fact been sneaking a couple of cigarettes or they're trying to drink a little less, but they haven't been successful.

It's hard to come clean and tell your doctor, this is what's actually going on in my life.

You tell the story of a physician named John Cullen, who was literally about to cut open a patient to take out their appendix, but then realized that the patient may in fact not have appendicitis after all.

I mean, it's kind of incredible, isn't it?

People are willing to have themselves cut open instead of revealing something that they think is shameful.

Yeah, yeah.

You also tell another hospital story, this one involving a patient who was bleeding uncontrollably during surgery.

Besides complicating our medical care when we don't share things with our doctors, I understand there's research showing that secrecy negatively affects our immune functioning?

You talk about one of the costs of self-concealment is that it can keep us from forming relationships or deepening relationships.

You tell the story of perhaps a trivial encounter in an elevator when you were a young scholar on the job market.

Tell me that story, Leslie.

In other words, you basically, you know, you put yourself out there.

He declined.

And the point that you're making is not just that you didn't have an exchange in that elevator for 30 seconds, but in some ways it's had ramifications.

You know, it's echoed, if you will, down the years where you actually haven't tried to make a connection with it.

So many of us, I think, intuit that self-concealment has costs, Leslie, and many of us, I think, intuit what those costs are.

But one reason we hide is that we believe that we alone harbor shameful secrets.

Talk about this idea that when it comes to the things that we hold secret, we somehow imagine that we are the only ones holding those secrets.

I'm wondering if social media in some ways compounds this, because now we not only don't hear people's secrets, but we're constantly being presented this view of other people's lives that's always glamorous and excited and people having a great time at fancy restaurants.