In his new book, author Dan Brown tackles the ultimate mystery : NPR
In his new book, author Dan Brown tackles the ultimate mystery
September 9, 2025, 4:27 PM ET, Heard on All Things Considered
By Scott Detrow, Tyler Bartlam, and Jeanette Woods
5-Minute Listen Transcript
npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-550…
Author Dan Brown is known for storylines that delve into myth and conspiracy theories. His new book — The Secret of Secrets — tackles the ultimate mystery: human consciousness.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Robert Langdon is back in action, the dashing and brilliant Harvard professor who has a knack for wandering into situations where he unearths big philosophical questions and at the same time gets chased around by bad guys who do not want those questions answered. Langdon is, of course, the recurring main character in author Dan Brown’s thrillers “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels & Demons” and many others. In Brown’s latest novel, “The Secret Of Secrets,” Langdon has traded the mysteries of Christianity and the mysteries of Freemasonry for the even bigger mystery of the nature of human consciousness. Dan Brown, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
DAN BROWN: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: So this is by my count your sixth book starring Robert Langdon. How has he changed over the years?
BROWN: (Laughter) Well, he’s aging much more slowly than I am, I’ve sensed.
DETROW: (Laughter).
BROWN: You know, this book took eight years to write. And Langdon, who is always – he’s always skeptical about all things conspiratorial and paranormal and all that sort of stuff. And in this book, he is sort of dragged out of his comfort box by a noetic scientist named Katherine Solomon. And he becomes a believer in aspects of consciousness that to most of us, myself included, seem quite out of this world.
DETROW: I want to ask about the topic of the book. How much were you personally thinking about these big questions of consciousness? Was that how the book started out? Is that something you were wrestling with or wondering about and wanting to learn more about?
BROWN: Absolutely. I mean, it’s no secret I like to write about big, sweeping, important topics, you know?
DETROW: Yeah.
BROWN: There really is no topic bigger, that I can imagine, than consciousness. It’s the lens through which we see reality, see ourselves, see our interactions with other people. And I wrote the character Katherine Solomon maybe 10 or 12 years ago as an ancillary character in another book, and she was a noetic scientist. And through the research for that book, I started to learn about noetic science. And some of these mind experiments who have results that are simply – you cannot believe them. You hear what the result is and you say, that’s impossible. And you read more, and you find out that reality is a much stranger thing than we ever imagined.
DETROW: For those of us who aren’t as familiar, can you briefly explain noetic science?
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