Ep149 "What makes a brain grow up resilient?" with David Sussillo

How can a brain grow up in chaos but find its way to order? There are many ways to have a bad childhood, but why do some children break while others bend and keep going? How much of who you are is written in your genes & how much is sculpted by your environment? How many versions of you were possib…

Ep148 "How can we improve political dialog?" with Saul Perlmutter

How can we improve political dialogue, and what does this have to do with the discovery that the universe behaves differently than expected? Why do we cling to beliefs even when evidence pushes against them? What if the biggest problem facing humanity could be solved with practice? Join Eagleman to…

Ep147 "Can we engineer human thought?" with Tom Griffiths

Can the mind be captured with math? Modern AI seems to have burst out of the gate recently, but is it actually the latest chapter in a 300-year project to turn thought into something we can model? Why does current AI need petabytes of data, but a child can learn from just a few examples? Why does A…

Ep146 "Who Counts as Human in Your Mind?" with Lasana Harris

When do you view another person like an object? This is what neuroscientists mean when they talk about de-humanization: your brain doesn't crank up its social circuitry to understand the other person as having a mind like you do. Is dehumanization a cause of violence, or the fuel that keeps it burn…

Ep145 Why do we compulsively click on ragebait? with Angele Christin

Do algorithms shape our lives? What did clickbait look like before the internet? Why do journalists start writing differently when metrics are introduced? What does any of this have to do with cooking pasta in the bathtub, the actress  Sarah Bernhardt, or Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the yea…

Ep144 "How do things last?" Part 2: Millennia with Alexander Rose

What is a 10,000 year clock? What is the Y10k bug? What allows some organizations to last a millennium? What do ancient ceramics have to do with ball bearings in satellites? What does any of this have to do with bristlecone pine trees, cymbals, or an extant hotel that launched in the sixth century?…

Ep143 "How do things last?" Part 1: neurons to civilizations

What makes things last, and what do very different lasting things have in common? Why might a space alien not be able to understand music? Why do windows in medieval cathedrals look thicker at the bottom, and what does this reveal about the world’s religions? What was the most important weapon in a…

Ep142 "Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers?" with Eric Weinstein

Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in a larger game they barely see? What if …

Ep141 "What do brains and weather systems have in common?" with Nicole Rust

Does brain science need a new grand plan? Is the brain less like an assembly line and more like a weather system? What does this mean for what counts as explanatory, and how might AI help us in the near future? What does any of this have to do with how the drug Ritalin got its name? Today we’ll spe…

Ep140 "How does your brain decide what’s true?" with Sam Harris

Why do we believe what we believe? Why is changing our opinions so difficult, and why does a challenged belief so often feel like a personal attack? What if beliefs didn’t evolve to be true, but to be socially useful? Today we speak with Sam Harris about the topic of our beliefs: how we see the wor…