Podcast

What happens when old brain circuitry collides with modern tech? Are we heading into an age of abundance, and can abundance create its own psychological problems? Do we need friction in our lives to become better humans? Could curiosity become the most important survival skill of the twenty-first century? What happens to your biological neural networks when artificial neural networks do your thinking for you? Eagleman sits down with author and researcher Steven Kotler to discuss his new book, We Are As Gods.

A brain computer interface (BCI) is any technology that allows you to connect your 3 pounds of wetware to a computer. But instead of implanting electrodes via neurosurgery, might the next revolution in BCIs come from something very small, like nanoparticles? Would this allow us to spy on millions (or billions) of neurons talking at once -- and could we do so without opening the skull? Will this allow BCI tech to become as common as smartphones? Join Eagleman as he talks with the company Subsense about why the next brain-computer interface might come from thinking small.

Have you ever spent hours with a thought cycling around in your head? What happens when the brain continuously worries, craves, or replays something without finding the exit? Where does the feeling of being “done” come from? Might depression, addiction, OCD, and PTSD all share the same problem? Is mental freedom just the ability to change states? Join Eagleman with neuroscientist and psychiatrist Jonathan Downar to talk about doom loops and how we might break them.

Does your identity and performance change in different situations? What does this have to do with wondering how you’re being judged? What if polarization grows from uncertainty more than hatred? Might social uncertainty be more common than prejudice? Why do strangers become enemies so easily? Can we engineer more trust into society? Today Eagleman sits down with Stanford social psychologist Claude Steele to explore the hidden psychological forces that shape who we become whenever we wonder how other people see us.

What is artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how close are we to getting there? What defines the next step, called artificial superintelligence (ASI), and why might the gap between those two be so dangerous? When machines become smarter than us, what roles are left for humanity? Should we think of AI as software, or as something we’re raising like a child? Will tomorrow’s AI destroy us, ignore us, or protect us? This week Eagleman talks with computer scientist & AI researcher Ben Goertzel.

For all of medical history, we’ve tried to persuade sick cells to behave better. What if instead we just swapped them out? Can we insert new brain cells grown from your own skin cells? And what does any of this have to do with sending one’s own cells into space, or rescuing animals on the very brink of extinction? Today we talk with stem cell biologist Jeanne Loring about the exciting next horizons.

What do honeybee brains have in common with human brains -- and with the AI that beat the world's best Go player? What simple algorithm has been hiding inside brains for 100s of millions of years? When babies throw food from a high chair again and again, are they being mischievous or are they running physics experiments? And what does any of this have to do with whether dopamine is more than a pleasure molecule, or whether there are laws of physics we have yet to discover, or whether large language models are going to get outdated in favor of a new approach? Join Eagleman with computational neuroscientist Read Montague to explore how very old systems in our brains map onto the future of AI.

Are you the author of your thoughts or just their witness? Do we simply watch our thoughts like we watch unfolding dream plots? What if the most familiar thing you experience — yourself — isn’t really there? If that’s the case, why does the experience of the self feel so solid that it often takes a lifetime to notice something strange? Why would evolution invent the feeling of a self at all? Join Eagleman with philosopher & neuroscientist Sam Harris as they explore the self, meditation, dreams, movies, and much more.

Could a tiny injury to your brain change your personality? If your friends didn’t know something had happened in your brain, would they just think you're choosing to act strangely? What if the self is nothing but a fragile coalition of neural processes? Join Eagleman today with Masud Husain, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Oxford, to explore fascinating case studies about how changes in the brain lead to changes in the self.