Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Rebroadcast Ep48 "Why do brains become depressed?" Nov 04, 2024

What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what does any of this have to do with measuring depression medications in city water supplies, reward pathways in the brain, the prevalence of tuberculosis, and zapping the head with magnetic stimulation? Join today's episode with David Eagleman and his guest -- psychiatrist Jonathan Downar -- for a deep dive into the brain science behind depression and what new solutions are on the horizon.

Ep31 rebroadcast "Why do we see #TheDress differently?" Oct 28, 2024

Why can you hear some sounds two different ways, depending on which word you’re looking at? Why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face? How can you have rich visual experience with your eyes closed? Are some crosswalk buttons fake? Why are some pictures interpretable only once you’ve been told what to look for? And although brains are often celebrated for their parallel processing, what should they really be celebrated for? Tune in to learn what happens when the raw facts of the world collide with your expectations.

Ep1 rebroadcast "Does time really slow down when you're in fear for your life?" Oct 21, 2024

When he was a child, Eagleman fell off a roof and time seemed to run in slow motion. When he became a neuroscientist, he grew curious about the experience and collected hundreds of similar stories from others. But is it true that your brain can actually see in slow motion, like Neo in the Matrix? And how would you test that? Hear how he dropped volunteers from a tower to put the science to the test, and what the answer reveals about our perception, memory, and experience of the world.

Ep80 "What's it like to never forget?" Oct 14, 2024

What would it be like to have a vastly better memory than you do now? What if you could remember what you were wearing on any day a dozen years ago? Or who you were with, what the conversation was, and whether it rained? Would it be a blessing or a curse? And if you’re forgetting a lot of your life, what might you do to better remember it? Join Eagleman with actress Marilu Henner, one of only dozens of people in the world diagnosed with highly superior autobiographical memory.

Ep79 "Does everyone have different mind's eyes, mind's ears, and mind's tongues?" Oct 07, 2024

When you imagine something -- like the sun peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm -- do you see it with rich visual detail, or instead with very little internal picture? In an earlier episode we tackled the spectrum of visual imagination, from hyperphantasia to aphantasia -- and in this episode we dive even deeper with guest Joel Pearson to surface the most surprising differences between people's internal lives. How does your experience differ from other people's, and how does your brain cobble together the skills you have to accomplish what you need?

Ep78 "Does your brain have one model of the world or thousands?" Sep 30, 2024

Why do you see a unified image when you open your eyes, even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a small part of the world?
What is special about the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, and what does that have to do with the way that you explore and come to understand the world? Are there new theories of how the brain operates? And in what ways is it doing something very different than current AI? Join Eagleman with guest Jeff Hawkins, theoretician and author of "A Thousand Brains" to dive into Hawkins' theory of many models running in the brain at once.

Ep77 "What is Life?" Sep 23, 2024

How do you define what things are living and dead? You might look at a sprinting cheetah and say it's clearly alive, whereas a chunk of rock is not -- but where do we draw the line? What might we expect extraterrestrials to look like, and would we even have the capacity to recognize them? And what does any of this have to do with Frankenstein, ancient Greek philosophers, or the possibility of finding a cell phone on Mars? Join Eagleman with guest Sara Walker, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and author of the book “Life as No One Knows It”.

Ep76 "How do you decide?" (Part 2) Sep 16, 2024

Do brains time travel? What is a prediction error? What does any of this have to do with the 2008 crash of the economy, how we keep internal price tags, or a rational approach to drug addiction in society? Join Eagleman to learn how your 3-pound universe spends its whole existence nailing down choices.

Ep75 "How do you decide?" (Part 1) Sep 09, 2024

When you make a decision about what food to order, what's happening in your brain? How do you clinch long-term decisions, like hitting the gym instead of doomscrolling? And what does any of this have to do with the ancient Greeks, alien hand syndrome, and constraining a president who wants to launch a nuclear bomb? Join Eagleman this week and next to discover how your brain weighs alternatives and nails down decisions.

Ep74 "Why do we laugh?" Sep 02, 2024

From the brain’s point of view, what is humor? When something is funny, why do we breathe in and out rapidly? Do other animals laugh? Why do most jokes come in threes? What do mystery novelists, magicians, and comedians have in common? Could AI be truly funny? Join Eagleman this week to appreciate the tens of reasons and millions of years behind the tickling of your neural pathways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Ep63 "Why do brains love faces?" Jun 17, 2024

Why do we have so much circuitry in the brain devoted to faces? Why does your electrical plug seem to look like a little face? Did aliens plant a signal for us on Mars, or are we looking at a quirk of our own brains? What is face blindness and what is a super recognizer? What does any of this have to do with looking at a magazine upside down, or why computer algorithms sometimes think a jack-o'-lantern is a person? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into something so fundamental as to be typically invisible.

Ep62 "Is it possible to rehumanize the enemy?" Jun 10, 2024

The brain easily forms ingroups and outgroups – and shows different responses when viewing one or the other. At the extreme, the brain stops seeing outgroup members as people, but more like objects. But are there ways to rehumanize? And in this context, what do heroes look like? In this episode, Eagleman talks with two men -- Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah -- one Israeli and one Palestinian. The two men, full of pain and sorrow, are fighting. But they are fighting side by side. They are fighting to repair the future. Learn what peacebuilders are, how they function, and what this has to do with the neuroscience of dehumanization, ingroups, outgroups, and the possibilities -- both political and neural -- for rehumanization.

Ep61 "When should you (not) trust your intuition?" Jun 03, 2024

Why do you sometimes feel that you trust this person but not that one -- for reasons you can't quite put your finger on? What signals does the brain vacuum up in your daily life, and what fraction of those does your conscious mind have access to? When does intuition steer us wrong? And what is the future of intuition, as we build new technologies to take the myriad signals racing around in the dark of our brains and bodies and bring them to light? Join Eagleman and his guest, cognitive neuroscientist Joel Pearson, to unpack when to trust and when to ignore the signals of intuition.

Ep60 "Can we think better by wrestling with conflicting ideas?" May 27, 2024

Why do we believe our own truths so strongly? What is steel-manning, and why is it so important? What does any of this have to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, or the future of our society? This week's episode deals with polarization and what we might do about it. Join Eagleman and his guest Isaac Saul, who works to represent different points of view in his newsletter Tangle -- all in the name of the intellectual humility that can blossom from grappling with conflicting ideas.

Ep59 "Do you visualize like I do?" May 20, 2024

How do brains picture things internally, and how might you and I imagine differently? How have recent discoveries completely changed the debate and the way we understand internal experience? What does this have to do with Disney's Fantasia, or Pixar's aphantasia? Strap in for some very wild surprises today about our internal experiences, with guest Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar Studios.

Ep58 "What do brains teach us about whether AI is creative?" May 13, 2024

From a neuroscience point of view, what is creativity? How does it shine light on the current lawsuits over large language models and whether they produce anything fundamentally new... or are simply remixing the old? How do the arts expose something important about what's happening in the human brain? What do we know about the cultural evolution of ideas? And what does any of this have to do with how cell phones got their names, and why koala bears don’t write novels? Join Eagleman and his guest, composer Anthony Brandt, as they uncover the surprises about creativity.

Ep57 "When should new technologies enter the courtroom?" May 06, 2024

Can we measure a lie from a blood pressure test, or pedophilia from a brain scan? And how should a judge decide whether the technology is good enough? What does this have to do with Ronald Reagan, or antisocial personality disorder, or how the television show CSI has impacted courtrooms? Today’s episode lives at the intersection of brains and the legal system. When are new neuroscience techniques allowed in courts, and when should they be?

Rebroadcast of Ep7 "Is AI truly intelligent? How would we know if it got there?" Apr 29, 2024

David is taking his birthday week off and wanted to re-share this episode due to it's ongoing relevance.

Modern AI is blowing everyone’s mind. But is it intelligent like humans, or is it just playing impressive statistical games? Could AI reach or exceed our level of intelligence, and how would we know when it gets there? Traditional tests for intelligence (Turing test, Lovelace test, etc) have long been surpassed, so Eagleman proposes a new kind of test.

Ep56 "Why do we care so much about touch?" Apr 22, 2024

Why does a cold pool feel warmer the second time you dip your toes in? Why does a safecracker run his fingers over sandpaper? Why do Mediterranean cultures touch each other more than Scandinavian cultures? Would it be great -- or not so great -- if you were unable to feel physical pain? Why does stubbing your toe have different sensations through time? And what does any of this have to do with cuddle puddles, NBA players bumping chests, or puppies sleeping in dog piles? Today’s episode is a love story about our sense of touch: what it is, how it works, and why it plays such a critical role in our lives.

Ep55 "Could a brain plugin instantly teach you to fly a helicopter?" Apr 15, 2024

Could you instantaneously learn to fly a helicopter -- not by practicing, but instead by uploading instructions directly to your brain? What would society do if children no longer had to go to school? And what does any of this have to do with suntan booths, nanorobots, or what a cowboy on a hill is not able to see? Join Eagleman to learn about the possibility of modifying the microscopic structure of your brain and leapfrogging education. What are the possibilities, the caveats, and the unexpected complexities?

Ep54 "Where do you end and others begin?" Apr 08, 2024

From the brain’s point of view, what is the self? How do 30 trillion cells come to feel like a single entity? Does the "self" of a blind person include the tip of her walking stick? How flexible is our sense of self? And what does any of this have to do with psychedelics, trauma, synchronized swimmers, religious rituals, cheerleaders, or why soldiers across time and place love to march in lockstep? Join Eagleman for this week's episode of surprises about how the brain computes the self.

Ep 53 " Can societies fight better? " Apr 01, 2024

Presumably we're not going to solve the problem of conflict between groups of people -- but what would better conflict look like? And what does that have to do with brains, the spread of homo sapiens, social media recommender algorithms, tribalism, intellectual humility, or the Iroquois Native Americans? Join this week's episode with guest Jonathan Stray -- a conflict researcher -- for an episode about brain science, war, empathy, outgroups, and how we might do better.

Ep 52 "What is lucid dreaming?" (Sleeping & Dreaming Part 3) Mar 25, 2024

Can you become conscious inside a dream? Can a researcher convey information to a dreamer, and can the dreamer find some way to answer back? Does 10 seconds inside a dream equal 10 seconds in real life? Could taking a drug inside a dream give you a placebo effect? Can you prompt your brain like a large language model? And if so, what would you pose to your unconscious brain? Join David Eagleman and guest Jonathan Berent to discover the what, why, and how of lucid dreaming.

Ep 51 "Why do brains dream?" Mar 18, 2024

Why do brains dream, and why are dreams so bizarre? Why doesn't your clock work in your dreams? And even though you spend much of your working day looking at your cell phone and computer – why do they almost never make appearances in your dream content? Is dream content the same across cultures and across time? Are dreams experienced in black & white, or in color? Are dreams the strange love child of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet? What is the relationship between schizophrenia and dreaming? In the future, will we be able to read out the content of somebody's dream? Join Eagleman this week to learn why and how we spend a fraction of our sleep time locked in different realities, swimming in plots which aren't real but which compel us entirely nonetheless.

Ep50 "Why do we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep?" (Sleeping & Dreaming Part 1) Mar 11, 2024

Why do we spend 1/3 of our lives in the strange doppelganger state of sleep? Can we die from a lack of sleep? How long is it possible to keep yourself awake (and why does the Guinness Book of World Records no longer track that)? Why are some people night owls and some morning larks? What does any of this have to do with lightless underground caves, or with the length of a day on Mars? Join this week's episode to learn everything you've ever wanted to know about sleep and what your brain is actually doing during this time. This is the first of a 3-parter: next week we'll dive into dreams, and the week after that into lucid dreams.

Ep49 "Can you read the brain to detect a lie? Mar 04, 2024

Could you get convicted of a crime based on your brain activity? Are brain scan lie detectors accepted in court, or would that count as illegal search and seizure? And what does this have to do with your mouth getting dry, the orbits under your eyes getting hot, and your voice constricting when you deceive? Join Eagleman to dive into the fascinating topic of whether societies can use technology to figure out whether a person is telling the truth -- and under what circumstances we would even want to go there.

Ep48 "Why do brains become depressed?" Feb 26, 2024

What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what does any of this have to do with measuring depression medications in city water supplies, reward pathways in the brain, the prevalence of tuberculosis, and zapping the head with magnetic stimulation? Join today's episode with David Eagleman and his guest -- psychiatrist Jonathan Downar -- for a deep dive into the brain science behind depression and what new solutions are on the horizon.

Ep47 "Wheels rotate backwards on TV, but do they ever in real life?" Feb 19, 2024

Do our visual systems see in frames like a movie camera or instead analyze the world continuously? Why do you see multiple hands when you clap under yellow street lamps? How did Hollywood launch from the question of whether all four legs of a galloping horse come off the ground at once? And what is the very surprising thing that happens if you stare at your ceiling fan for a long time while it turns? This week’s episode is about visual perception -- and a series of eye-opening revelations about how the brain takes in information from the world.

Ep46 "Who says you're dead?" Feb 12, 2024

Can a person be declared legally dead even though he is very much alive? In December of 2010, why did a number of families choose to pull their loved ones off life support just before the new year? How do doctors decide when you've died, and how is it different from how lawyers decide? How is death a process rather than an event? What does any of this have to do with getting buried alive, your family's religious beliefs, or whether a head stays alive after the guillotine? Join Eagleman and guest Jacob Appel, an emergency room psychiatrist and head of ethics, for an episode about the science and the questions about death -- including who's domain it is to call it, and where this is all heading.

Ep45 "Why did a man shoot himself after hearing the lottery numbers?" (Time Traveling: Part 3) Feb 05, 2024

Who is the most disappointed medalist at the Olympics? How do brains simulate what might have been? How can you get your kid to wear a jacket in the cold? What if you had to face more successful versions of yourself? And what does any of this have to do with why menus should be shorter, why empires divide, and why you should always put yourself in the shoes of future people? Join Eagleman to learn the capstone secrets of mental time travel, and what these have to do with the emotions of regret and relief.

Ep44 "Why can't you tickle yourself?" (Time Traveling Part 2) Jan 29, 2024

Why are people who can't remember their past also unable to picture their future? Why do we get so anxious about the world changing around us? What should you advise the president if we find ourselves at war with extraterrestrials? And what does this have to do with Wayne Gretzky, or the Greek goddess of memory, or hitting a bottle to get ketchup onto your French fries? Join this week's episode to find out about one of the most important things brains do: simulations of possible futures.

Ep43 "How do we remember?" (Time Traveling Part 1) Jan 22, 2024

How do billions of neurons store your home address, your ability to ride a bike, and the history of your life? How does memory work in the brain, and how is it different from the way a computer stores information? And what does any of this have to do with the Happy Birthday song, squirrels hiding acorns, bards memorizing epics, or people who cannot forget any of the events of their life? Join Eagleman to learn how and why your brain continually time travels to previous moments.

Ep42 "Is there any such thing as true news?" (Truth Part 3: Artificial Intelligence) Jan 15, 2024

What role will AI play in the future of fake news and misinformation? What does this have to do with our brains’ internal models, with voice passwords, and with what Eagleman calls "the tall intelligence problem"? And why does he believe that these earliest days of AI are its golden age, and we are quickly heading for a balkanization? Join for today's episode about truth, misinformation, and artificial intelligence.

Ep41 "Is there any such thing as true news?" (Truth Part 2: the Internet) Jan 08, 2024

What is the future of misinformation on the internet? Is it possible that the invention of the internet has improved access to truth? What does any of this have to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, Soviet agriculture, liberation technology, Kenyan elections, Barbra Streisand's house, and Twitter revolutions? Join Eagleman for a surprising foray into the thorny forest of truth in the age of the internet.

Ep40 "Is there any such thing as true news?" (Truth Part1) Jan 01, 2024

We all worry about fake news. But is misinformation and disinformation really new? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of truth. Why do cameras not tell us what we think they do? What should we not forget about pamphleteering? And what does this have to do with agriculture in the USSR, or book banning in America, or dog whistles, or apps that only tell facts? And why is it so hard to understand the viewpoints of millions of brains at once? This week's episode is the first of a three-parter -- and today we tackle truth in the media.

Ep39 "What is the future of AI relationships?" Dec 18, 2023

Why are our brains so wired for love? Could you fall head over heels for a bot? Might your romantic partner be more satisfied with a 5% better version of you? How does an AI bot plug right into your deep neural circuitry, and what are the pros and cons? And what will it mean when humans you love don’t have to die, but can live on in your phone forever? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into relationships, their AI future, and what it all means for our species.

Ep38 "Why is it hard to teach an old brain new tricks?" Dec 11, 2023

Is it always harder to teach an old dog new tricks? Why is an older person slower to learn a new language but able to learn new faces easily? Why does Arnold Schwartzenegger have an accent but Mila Kunis doesn’t, even though neither spoke English as a child? Why is there a correlation between how tall a person is and how much salary they're likely to earn? What would it mean to say that you are born as many people but die as a single one? This week's episode dives into surprises about brain plasticity and why your flexibility changes throughout your lifetime.

Ep37 "What is Insanity?" Part 2 Dec 04, 2023

What does the insanity defense mean in a court of law? And is there such a thing as temporary insanity? Is the twinkie defense a real thing? Can someone use premenstrual syndrome as a defense? And what does the legal wrestling around insanity tell us about the differences between brains: yours and other people’s, or even yours one day and yours the next day? How does law comport with science, and how are they sometimes like two people with quite different ways of looking at the world? Join to find out what happened to Andrea Yates, how the legal system deals with mental illness, and so much more.

Inner Cosmos Inbox 2 Nov 30, 2023

Eagleman answers listeners questions.

Ep36 "What is Insanity?" Part 1 Nov 27, 2023

What is the insanity defense? Are some people’s brains so different that it makes sense to use a different legal category? How does a legal system decide where the dividing line is? How are science and law strange bedfellows? Join us for the first of two episodes about the insanity defense: where it comes from, where it's going, and why it is so difficult to decide where to draw our societal lines.

Ep35 "What sticks in your brain and what doesn’t? " Nov 20, 2023

f you look at a brain, how can you immediately tell if it belongs to a piano player or a violinist? How can a dog learn how to walk on its rear legs? And what does this have to do with expertise, or the good news about the brains of digital natives, or how governments respond to change just like brains do? While we all like to talk about brain plasticity, the truth is that most of what happens in your life makes no meaningful change to your brain. So what’s the difference between the stuff that sticks and the stuff that doesn’t?

Ep34 "What is intelligence?" Nov 13, 2023

What would it be like to have a much lower or higher IQ than you currently have -- for example, to be a squirrel or an advanced space alien? This week's episode is about intelligence. What is it and what is its history and future? Join Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of several schools of thought about what intelligence might mean in the brain.

Ep33 "Why do they start sprinters with a bang instead of a flash?" Nov 06, 2023

Why do they use a gun at the Olympics? And why can you get off the blocks after the bang but still be disqualified for jumping the gun? Few things are as bizarre as our time perception. From sprinters to basketball players, from Kubla Khan to Oppenheimer, from television broadcasting to hallucinations, Eagleman unmasks illusions of time that surround us. Why does the brain work so hard to pull off editing tricks? And what does this tell us about our perception of reality?

Ep32 "Is death reversible?" Oct 30, 2023

Does life end inevitably or instead only because we don’t understand biology well enough yet? Today’s episode is about understanding what happens when your molecular cycles grind to a halt... and whether there's anything we can do to hit control-Z. Join Eagleman and his guest Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja to dive into the weird possibility of understanding cells well enough to reverse death.

Inner Cosmos Inbox 1 Oct 25, 2023

Eagleman answers listeners questions.

Ep31 "Why do we see #TheDress differently?" Oct 23, 2023

Why can you hear some sounds two different ways, depending on which word you’re looking at? Why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face? How can you have rich visual experience with your eyes closed? Are some crosswalk buttons fake? Why are some pictures interpretable only once you’ve been told what to look for? And although brains are often celebrated for their parallel processing, what should they really be celebrated for? Tune in to learn what happens when the raw facts of the world collide with your expectations.

Ep30 "What does it mean to know thyself in the age of neuroscience?" Part 2 Oct 16, 2023

Can we explain our rich experience of life only by studying the molecules that compose us? How is the color of your passport related to your chances of presenting with schizophrenia? Males are more predisposed to commit crime, so why don’t all males commit crime? And what does any of this have to do with traffic jams, why Seinfeld is funny, and how we’re ever going to come to know ourselves from studying biology? Join Eagleman to talk about levels of understanding, what a meaningful explanation would look like, and the possibility that we are not near the conclusion of science's journey, but instead near the beginning.

Ep29 "What does it mean to know thyself?" Part 1 Oct 09, 2023

Did Joan of Arc turn the tide of the 100 Years War as the result of a brain disorder? Would you appreciate Taylor Swift if you only had an internal camera to watch her vocal chords? What do almost all drugs of abuse have in common? How can the tiny molecules of rabies virus control your behavior? Join Eagleman on a two-part deep dive into the fundamental question of how biological insights can shed light on the ancient question of who we are.

Ep28 "Does your language shape your thinking?" Oct 02, 2023

Are there really dozens of words for snow in northern cultures? What did the movie Arrival have to do with language and cognition? Why are Russians better than Americans at distinguishing certain shades of blue? And what does any of this have to do with space, time, gender, and how your language influences your thought? Join Eagleman and his guest, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, as they take a deep dive into the intersection of words and understanding.

Ep27 "Can we read brains at an airport to know who's going to bomb a plane?" Sep 25, 2023

Can your thoughts be read with neurotechnology? When is measuring the brain like reading the mind? How close or far are we from being able to know if you're thinking about some particular thing you did or intend to do? What's hype and what's real? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into mind reading: what it means, where we are now, and whether your thoughts could ever be readable with new technologies.

Ep26 "Why do people dislike moist more than moose, but not as much as merts?" Sep 18, 2023

We all know people who hate the word "moist". But why are they fine with synonyms such as "damp" or "wet"? What’s going on in their brains, and what does this have to do with synesthesia, autism, shapes, slacks, and sound probabilities? Join this week's episode as Eagleman leads us into the new and wild world of word aversion.

Ep25 "Why are we so easy to fool?" Sep 11, 2023

Why are we humans so easily deceived? What are the tricks of the trade, and how can we train ourselves to be more aware of them? What does all this have to do with Theranos, forged letters, and the shell game? Although you presumably wouldn't cheat a stranger out of all her money, there are people who would -- so how can we beef up our immunity against deception? Join Eagleman with guests Christopher Chabris and Dan Simons to discuss their new book, Nobody's Fool.

Ep24 "What does drug withdrawal have in common with heartbreak?" Sep 04, 2023

Why do you still feel the waves after getting off a boat? Why does the wall seem to come at you faster after you step off the treadmill? Why do the rocks seem to move upward after you stare at a waterfall? Why did people in the 1980s think their book pages had some red color in them… but no one thought that before or after the 80s? And what does any of this have to do with drugs, heartbreak, yellow sunglasses, or Aristotle watching a horse stuck in a river? Join Eagleman to understand how the brain constantly readjusts its circuitry to best read the world, and what it means for our (sometimes strange) perceptions of what's out there.

Ep23 "How can we learn to speak alien?" Aug 28, 2023

If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they're saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet... and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon.

Ep22 "What do we find beautiful?" Aug 21, 2023

Why do briefly glimpsed people appear to be more attractive? Why did portrait photographers put Vaseline on their lenses, and what does that have to do with Instagram filters? Why are thirsty people more likely to perceive something as transparent? And what does any of that have to do with mating, optimal decision making, puberty, frogs, and movie stars? In this episode, Eagleman gets us to view the familiar as strange as we examine beauty, instincts, and what drives us.

Ep21 "How far would you follow authority?" Aug 14, 2023

Would you torture someone if you were commanded by an authority figure? To what degree are your decisions contextual, and what does this have to do with matching the length of a line, the Iroquois Native Americans, the banality of evil, soldiers posing with dead bodies of their enemies, propaganda, giving shocks to a stranger, or how we should educate our children? Join Eagleman for part 2 of the exploration into brains, dehumanization, and what we can do to improve our possible future.

Ep20 "Why does your brain care more about some people than others?" Aug 07, 2023

Why do we so naturally form ingroups and outgroups? And what does that have to do with evolution, monkeys, Greeks, psychopaths, Syndrome E, and propaganda posters? Join Eagleman to learn why our brains are so wired for tribalism, what the consequences are for the world, and how a bit of knowledge goes a long way to making us more immune to propaganda.

Ep19 "How far can you trust your memory?" Jul 31, 2023

How good is your memory, really? Why do we feel so certain about our memory, even while it is so suspect? Can something told to you after an event change your memory of the event? Why is it so hard to reconstruct a face? Is there a relationship between confidence and accuracy? How is your ability to remember a scene changed if there's a gun pointed at you? Join Eagleman to find out why eyewitness testimony is the most questionable technology we allow in courts.

Ep18 "Could you upload your brain to live forever?" Jul 24, 2023

How would we know if we were living in a simulation? What if you were a butterfly having a dream it was a human? What does any of this have to do with John Lennon, or Renee Descartes, or freezing yourself in a vat of liquid nitrogen? How will we eventually solve the problem that human bodies can’t do space travel? Join Eagleman for a wild ride into the strange possibility of making brains immortal.

Ep17 "What is consciousness?" Jul 17, 2023

How do your billions of tiny brain cells build consciousness as they chatter away with electrical spikes and chemical signals? And why is your laptop, with its sophisticated algorithms and billions of parts, presumably not conscious? Could other large systems like a city become conscious? And what does this have to do with ant hills, blue birds, or your memory of your first kiss? Join Eagleman on a journey into one of the central mysteries of neuroscience: why we have awareness.

Ep16 "Why is everyone who disagrees with you misinformed?" Jul 10, 2023

Why is there so much polarization, and what does this have to do with neuroscience? Why do people on all sides of the political spectrum feel that if they could shout loudly enough in all caps on Twitter, everyone would come to see they’re right? And what does any of this have to do with literature, genetics, nobleman Lord Gordon, bumperstickers, visualization, or the Iroquois Native Americans? Join as Eagleman draws from distant fields to show why we always feel so certain we know the truth.

Ep15 "What should happen when someone with a brain tumor breaks the law?" Jul 03, 2023

When does neuroscience overlap with the legal system? Do we have free will or don't we? Did changes in Charles Whitman's brain have something to do with him becoming a mass shooter? Why was the heir to the Gucci fashion fortune killed by his wife? Join Eagleman on a wild journey to understand what happens when the study of the brain and the law end up in the same courtroom.

Ep14 "Why do we have so little access to what’s happening under the hood?" Jun 26, 2023

Who is doing the choosing when you make a choice? Is there someone in your head but it’s not you? What is a chicken-sexer, and what do they have to do with British plane spotters during WWII? Do we have free will or don’t we? Dive in to discover the ways in which you typically operate with no conscious access to your behaviors.

Ep13 "Will you perceive the event that kills you?" Jun 19, 2023

How far in the past do you live? Why are live television shows not actually live? What does any of this have to do with nuclear bombs, car accidents, plane crashes, volcanos, or the last episode of the Sopranos? Join Eagleman in a mind-bending dive into the neuroscience of time and what it could mean for your last moment.

Ep12 "Can we create new senses for humans?" Jun 12, 2023

Can a blind person come to see through her tongue? What would it be like to smell with the nose of a dog? How can we perceive streams of information that are normally invisible to us? And what does any of this have to do with pilots or Westworld or tinnitus or friendly fire or a wristband with vibratory motors? We don't detect most of the action going on in the world around us... and today we'll explore how technology might change that.

Ep11 "What does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet?" Jun 05, 2023

Why are some of the best musicians blind? Can blind people learn how to echolocate, like a bat? What do your nightly dreams have to do with the rotation of the planet? Once we find alien life on other planets, should we expect that aliens have dreams at night? Find out why dreaming might be the strange lovechild of brain plasticity.

Ep10 "Why is it so hard to spot a counterfeit bill?" May 29, 2023

What do charlatans have to understand about human perception? Why are you so bad at recognizing a real penny among fakes? What did Eagleman have to do with the redesign of the Euro, and why did he campaign to the European Central Bank that all their bills should be blank with a single hologram in the middle? In this episode, explore the crossroads of perception and deception. Brief appearance from special guest Adam Savage.

Ep9 "What does eating that cookie have to do with the hero of the Trojan war?" May 22, 2023

We all have goals, and we all face temptations that get in the way. So what's happening in the brain when we act in a manner that isn't in accordance with who we want to be? Computers don’t have these problems, but being human can be tough. In the previous two episodes we exposed the rivaling networks battling it out under the surface. Today we’re going to talk about the gap between what you intend to do and what you actually do when temptation is there.

Ep8 "How does your brain decide what to buy?" May 15, 2023

What’s happening when you stand in the supermarket aisle and stare at the shelf full of options? It may not look like there’s much going on from the outside, but inside there’s a war of networks raging. How is your brain's decision-making influenced by price, emotions, and your group of friends? How would you choose between a nice candle and a chocolate bar in the shape of a computer keyboard? And what does any of this have to do with Starbucks or Tiger Woods or Burger King?

Ep7 "Is AI truly intelligent? How would we know if it got there?" May 08, 2023

Modern AI is blowing everyone’s mind. But is it intelligent like humans, or is it just playing impressive statistical games? Could AI reach or exceed our level of intelligence, and how would we know when it gets there? Traditional tests for intelligence (Turing test, Lovelace test, etc) have long been surpassed, so Eagleman proposes a new kind of test.

Ep6 "What will AI mean for artists?" May 02, 2023

Will writers, artists, and musicians find themselves unemployed by AI? What are the new capabilities we’re seeing and what does it all mean for human creativity? And what does this have to do with diamonds, Westworld, effort, Frankenstein, photography, Beethoven, and the Stark family in Game of Thrones?

Ep5 "How is your brain like a team of rivals?" Apr 24, 2023

Would you kill one person to save the lives of five others? Why do you find yourself on the horns of a dilemma when someone offers you a chocolate cake? How can you believe different things at once? Find out what's running under the hood in this first episode of a three-parter about our decision making -- and how a little knowledge of neuroscience can allow us to make better decisions.

Ep4 "Do people experience different realities?" Apr 17, 2023

Do you see blue the same way I do on the inside? Why do some people think the northern lights make noise? Why do you think the low note on the piano is larger, and the high note brighter? Join Eagleman on a wild ride into the world of synesthesia, a topic his neuroscience laboratory has pioneered for years.

Ep3 "Could animals learn to speak human?" Apr 10, 2023

What is intelligence? Why don’t gophers write novels? Why didn't crows invent the internet? And what does any of this have to do with brain algorithms, finding aliens on earth, and why World War 5 could involve species besides Homo sapiens?

Ep2 "What would you do with robotic wings? (or How to get a better body)" Apr 03, 2023

How is it possible for a dog to become a champion surfer? Why does the world’s best archer have no arms? Why might someone come to believe that her leg doesn’t belong to her? How can we build robots that simply figure themselves out? In this episode, Eagleman unmasks mysteries about the brain's shocking flexibility -- revealing how it comes to drive whatever body it finds itself in, how it determines what the "self" is, and what this tells us about our future as humans.

Ep1 "Does time really slow down when you're in fear for your life?" Mar 27, 2023

When he was a child, Eagleman fell off a roof and time seemed to run in slow motion. When he became a neuroscientist, he grew curious about the experience and collected hundreds of similar stories from others. But is it true that your brain can actually see in slow motion, like Neo in the Matrix? And how would you test that? Hear how he dropped volunteers from a tower to put the science to the test, and what the answer reveals about our perception, memory, and experience of the world.

Introducing: Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman Mar 20, 2023

Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman discusses how our brain interprets the world and what that means for us. Through storytelling, research, interviews, and experiments, David Eagleman tackles wild questions that illuminate new facets of our lives and our realities.

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