Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

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Latest Episodes:

Ep73 "How do we fool ourselves in the stock market?" Aug 26, 2024

Show notes

What does neuroscience have to do with investment, and what does that have to do with Isaac Newton, the Dutch East India company, Kodak, the way zebras herd, our emotions, and almost 200 cognitive biases? Join Eagleman with guest Mark Matson, whose new book The American Dream dives into the cognitive illusions we face when trying to make investments.

Ep72 "How do you put yourself in other people's shoes (and can AI do it)?" Aug 19, 2024

Show notes

You know that moment in the horror movie where the monster is coming closer, but the movie star doesn't see it? Why does that drive you crazy, and what does that teach us about brains? What is theory of mind, and why is it so important for everyone from poker players to conmen to stage magicians to novelists? Join us this week to dive into a fundamental skill of human brains -- and the question of whether current AI has any ability to simulate other people's minds.

Ep71 "Why do our memories drift? Part 2: Misremembering yourself" Aug 12, 2024

Show notes

Is your notion of yourself built on narrative that may or may not be accurate? If someone told you an entirely false story about yourself, could you come to believe it? What does that have to do with six people who spent over a decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit? Join Eagleman for part 2 of some mind-blowing conclusions about your account of your own life.

Ep70 "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts" Aug 05, 2024

Show notes

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 witnessing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center? And what does any of this have to do with flashbulb memories, misinformation, and the telephone game that you played as a child? Join Eagleman for part 1 of an astonishing journey into what we believe about our memories.

Ep69 "Why do you see something everywhere after you've seen it once?" Jul 29, 2024

Show notes

What does the Baader-Meinhof Group, a West German terrorist group from the 1970s, have to do with the front of your brain, attention, salience, and synchronicity? And why might you soon hear about the Baader-Meinhof Group again, not for political reasons, but for reasons to do with your own neural networks? Join Eagleman for a dive into how we take in the world around us -- and how we get fooled about the frequencies of events.

Ep68 "What if our brains worked a trillion times faster?" Jul 22, 2024

Show notes

Why are the majority of stock trades decided by algorithms at timescales we can scarcely conceive of? What is it like to have the speed and power of a computer, and to be dealing with slow humans? Why are movies compelling, given that they are just a series of photographs flashed rapidly? And what happens if we someday discover planets with creatures who operate on totally different time scales? Join Eagleman this week for a deep dive into speed: the speed at which we operate, the speed at which our machines operate, and what this all means for the future as the divergence grows larger.

Ep67 "How did human brains get runaway intelligence? " Jul 15, 2024

Show notes

We're the single species who composes symphonies, erects skyscrapers, builds computers, and regularly gets off the planet. But how did human intelligence evolve from our ancestors in the animal kingdom? And now that our species is scintillatingly shrewd, what does a knowledge of our road mean as we work to build intelligence artificially? Join Eagleman this week with Max Bennett, an especially smart human who illuminates a path through the 600 million year story of brain power in his book "A Brief History of Intelligence".

Ep66 "Why do brains love conspiracy theories?" Jul 08, 2024

Show notes

Why are conspiracy theories a natural output of the brain? What do they have to do with puzzle-solving, cognitive dissonance, ingroups/outgroups, and storytelling? If you hear an unlikely explanation for something, what are effective and ineffective ways to assess it? Join Eagleman to understand from the point of view of the brain why conspiracy theories have always been so pervasive in human societies.

Ep65 "Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks?" Jul 01, 2024

Show notes

Did magicians discover tricks of the mind centuries before neuroscientists? Why can’t you see what they’re doing right in front of you? How do magicians steer your attention or appear to read your mind? Dive into the trapdoors of the human brain which allow the mind to get fooled. Join Eagleman with several guests: magician Robert Strong and cognitive neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde.

Ep64 "Why do familiar things lose their shine (& what can we do about it)? " Jun 24, 2024

Show notes

If you could get a kiss from your favorite celebrity, how long would you want to wait before receiving it? And why do things seem less meaningful or joyful over time than they were at the beginning? What does any of this have to do with Netflix releasing all the episodes of a new show at once, or why companies come out with new and improved products every year, or why French revolutionaries wanted to make a week five days long instead of seven? Join Eagleman and cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot to find out why everything dulls with time and what we can do to recover the shine.

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