Podcast

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 possible & why did this one win out? Join Eagleman today with David Sussillo, who was abandoned as a child but grew up to become a neuroscientist & technologist. We’ll explore what his trajectory teaches about our genes, brains, and our own lives.

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 today with Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist, but instead of the cosmos we talk about the inner cosmos: why polarization happens and how we might address it with a different kind of thinking.

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 AI have 'jagged' intelligence – meaning it looks brilliant in one moment and then does something that seems nonsensical? In physics we have various laws (gravity, motion, etc), and today we’re joined by cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths to ask whether we're moving towards laws of thought.

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 burning? Do people who view themselves as highly empathetic dehumanize more than others? And on the flip side, why do we sometimes think chatbots or robots are people with interior minds? Will kids raised with AI grow up to fight for AI rights? Today we dive deep into how your brain sees others with social neuroscientist Lasana Harris.

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 year? Join Eagleman with sociologist Angele Cristin to learn how algorithms invisibly sculpt our behavior.

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? Join today for thinking about ourselves on a 10,000 year timescale with guest Alexander Rose.

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 ancient history, and how did it disappear? Join today for the story of persistence, from sharks to schizophrenia to Roman concrete to DNA.

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 the most important ideas are the ones you’re not allowed to hear about? From Crick and Watson to nuclear bombs and AI, today we’ll cover it all with physicist, mathematician, and iconoclast Eric Weinstein.

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 speak with neuroscientist Nicole Rust, author of Elusive Cures.