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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 faci
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,
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 dehuman
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
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, cymb
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
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 scienti
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
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 Sa
Ep139 "What does alignment look like in a society of AIs?" with Danielle Perszyk
Is intelligence a property of individual brains, or is it something that emerges from many brains trying to align with one another? How can we build AI agents to improve our understanding of the world and to mediate between rivaling humans?
Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion for truth?" with Kaizen Asiedu
What if your confidence in your political beliefs does not correlate with their accuracy? Why does a pundit's outrage often feel so convincing and nuance so unsatisfying? Are conspiracy theories a predictable feature of human brains? Is the
Ep137 "Do cures ever create the next crisis?" with Thomas Goetz
Medications are among the most important advancements of science, but their social consequences are often complex. What if some of our most common diseases are design flaws of modern life? Does it matter if we're fixing a root cause rather
Ep136 "Why do we care about mattering?" with Rebecca Goldstein
What does it mean for your life to matter? We all talk a lot about happiness, pleasure, and meaning... but what if the real engine underneath it all is the need to feel we count? Is it possible that depression, extremism, and ambition all s
Ep135: What does neuroscience mean by hypnosis? with David Spiegel
What exactly is hypnosis? We’ve all heard of circus-like versions, but is there a real element to hypnosis that psychiatrists and neuroscientists are able to leverage? Can attention and expectation change what we feel (such as pain or anxie
Ep82 Re Broadcast "Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?" Part 1
Happy Holidays- New Episodes starting Jan. 5th Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though you're the same person you were a month ago? What does this have to do with the watercraft of t
Ep70 Re Broadcast "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts"
Happy Holidays- New episodes starting Jan. 5th Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American folklore, eyewitness memory of a car accident, or what a person remembers 3 years after wi
Ep134 "What do brains teach us about morality?" with Joshua Greene
Why will you make different moral decisions in similar circumstances? Why do some people make different choices than you? What happens when ancient moral instincts collide with modern problems such as pandemics, AI alignment, and political
Ep133 "Why do people hold misbeliefs?" with Dan Ariely
Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously false from the outside, as with conspiracy theories? Is this kind of misbelief a universal feature of human brains? Does it offer clarity and belonging when reality feels chaotic an
Ep132 "What will AI mean for the economy?" with Andrew Mayne
If AI can do everything from writing novels to designing proteins, what remains that only humans can do? What's the human advantage in a world where machines can outperform us at almost any measurable task? What does any of this have to do
Ep131 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 2: Rehumanization
How do societies work their way out of polarization? And what does the answer have to do with broken trucks, the Apollo program, the movie 'Watchmen', Iroquois Native Americans, a new idea for social media algorithms, moral taste buds, and
Ep130 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 1: Polarization
What do propaganda posters have in common across nation and time, and how is that related to the medial prefrontal cortex? What is behind repeating cycles of societal polarization? What does any of this have to do with the American Civil Wa
Ep129 "Is utopia possible or do human brains preclude it?" with Paul Bloom
Would a utopia be possible? Or does our innate tribalism and jealousy make perfect societies difficult to achieve? Do we secretly love hierarchies? Why are primate brains such excellent detectors of unfairness? Why do things become more des
Ep128 "Would space aliens see the world as we do?" with Daniel Whiteson
Imagine we eventually meet some alien scientists. If they can see electrons or smell photons, would their science look like ours? Is physics a universal language, or just a local dialect of the human brain? Would aliens use math, or might t
EP127 "What happens when we marry brains to machines?" with Sergey Stavisky
What is a brain-computer interface? How can a paralyzed person use her brain to control a robotic arm? How can someone who's lost the gift of speech use brain signals to broadcast his voice again? Can we eventually restore autonomy and dign
Ep126 "Does science fiction shape reality?" with Bethanie Maples
How is sci-fi like a cultural research and development lab? Will we someday have AI agents that live in robot bodies, and will we be liable if they commit murder? What happens when reality is no longer verifiable? How can we create AI advoc
Ep125 "Why do brains need friends?" (with Ben Rein)
Why do human brains need social interaction? Why might AI chatbots be insufficient to scratch the itch? What do we love so much about real human touch and in-person interaction? Why do so many of us live with dogs? From empathy to introvers
Ep124 "Why don't we notice gaps in time?"
How is your consciousness like a flame that continually goes out and gets re-lit? Why can you see other people's eyes move, but you can't see your own eyes move in the mirror? And what does any of this have to do with deep sleep, anesthesia
Ep123 "Will AI cure loneliness?" with Paul Bloom
On the one hand, AI companions are (increasingly) amazing at rectifying isolation. But on the other hand, loneliness is a biological signal that pushes us toward improving ourselves socially. So what's the right balance here? And does every
Ep122 "Why do we so rarely say what we mean?" (with Steven Pinker)
Why do people on a date speak in innuendo? Why do dictators squelch protests? Why do humans stand apart from the rest of the animal kingdom by blushing, laughing, and crying? And what does any of this have to do with bullies, George Costanz
Ep121 "What’s the secret to intelligence (in brains and AI)?" with Ramesh Raskar
Is AI going to go the same way as computing: from colossal LLMs owned by a few companies to billions of networked AI agents? How does that parallel one of the great underappreciated secrets of the human brain? Join this week with guest MIT
