92 | Kevin Hand on Life Elsewhere in the Solar System
It's hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous selection bias. That's the situation faced by people studying the nature and preval...
13 Apr 20201h 56min
91 | Scott Barry Kaufman on the Psychology of Transcendence
If one of the ambitious goals of philosophy is to determine the meaning of life, one of the ambitious goals of psychology is to tell us how to achieve it. An influential work in this direction was Abr...
6 Apr 20201h 19min
90 | David Kaiser on Science, Money, and Power
Science costs money. And for a brief, glorious period between the start of the Manhattan Project in 1939 and the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, physics was awash in it, la...
30 Mar 20201h 34min
89 | Lera Boroditsky on Language, Thought, Space, and Time
What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, ...
23 Mar 20201h 28min
Tara Smith on Coronavirus, Pandemics, and What We Can Do
This is a special episode of Mindscape, thrown together quickly. Many thanks to Tara Smith for joining me on short notice. Tara is an epidemiologist, and a great person to talk to about the novel coro...
18 Mar 20201h 20min
88 | Neil Shubin on Evolution, Genes, and Dramatic Transitions
"What good is half a wing?" That's the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Of course it's a very answerable question...
16 Mar 20201h 33min
87 | Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy
If you tell me that one of the world's leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the origin and nature of life more broadly, and uses concept...
9 Mar 20201h 29min
86 | Martin Rees on Threats to Humanity, Prospects for Posthumanity, and Life in the Universe
Anyone who has read histories of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 nuclear false alarm, must be struck by how incredibly close humanity has come to wreaking incredible dest...
2 Mar 20201h 40min
