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I often hear NPR’s regular feature “Hidden Brain” during my commute to work. But darn it if I didn’t miss the day NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam interviewed a Kansas University graduate student conducting research on drunken people outside Lawrence bars.

Thankfully, a colleague caught Tuesday’s story and shared it with me. (Hear NPR’s full story here.) In “Hidden Factors In Your Brain Help To Shape Beliefs On Income Inequality,” Vedantam interviews Laura Van Berkel, a KU graduate student in social psychology, about how hidden factors in the brain shape the way people think about hierarchies — examples might be high-status and low-status people in politics, or teacher-student relationships in childhood.

“Van Berkel’s theory is that for many of us, hierarchical thinking comes more easily and automatically, whereas egalitarian thinking requires more effort, so just like speaking your first language comes more naturally to you than speaking a second language,” Vedantam said.

He went on: “To test whether egalitarian thinking is secondary in the brain to hierarchical thinking, Van Berkel hit up on an ingenious idea. When people are drunk, they often reveal hidden attitudes because alcohol tends to make people feel disinhibited. That led Van Berkel and her colleagues to run an experiment.”

They stood outside bars (the story doesn’t specify which ones), surveyed patrons about how much they liked hierarchy and equality, and had them blow into a breathalyzer, according to the report. The drunker that people were, Van Berkel told Vedantam, the more they liked hierarchy and power over egalitarianism. That was true for both liberals and conservatives.

The story mentions some possible correlations and additional experiments, but the basic conclusion, Vedantam said, was that “if you want people to endorse hierarchical thinking, put them under time pressure or just get them drunk.”

• Selfie-surge at Allen Fieldhouse: Come to think of it, maybe I missed “Hidden Brain” because I got a late start after staying up until the end of No. 1 KU’s insane triple-overtime win over No. 2 Oklahoma Monday night. Hmm. Anyway.

A technology fun-fact about that came across my desk today: AT&T reported its Allen Fieldhouse-specific cellular network that night saw a data spike 75 percent greater than the average home game this season.

“More than 223 gigabytes of data were shared,” AT&T spokesman Chris Lester said. “This is equal to sharing about 635,000 social media selfies.”

Especially considering AT&T is just one of several wireless carriers — plus the fact that the Fieldhouse’s capacity is 16,300 — that is a lot of selfies.

https://twitter.com/apetrulis/status/684179027930685440

• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.