Ep71 "Why do our memories drift? Part 2: Misremembering yourself"
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 ...
12 Aug 202434min
Ep70 "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts"
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 witnessin...
5 Aug 202433min
Ep69 "Why do you see something everywhere after you've seen it once?"
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 th...
29 Jul 202437min
Ep68 "What if our brains worked a trillion times faster?"
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...
22 Jul 202443min
Ep67 "How did human brains get runaway intelligence? "
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 kingdo...
15 Jul 20241h 6min
Ep66 "Why do brains love conspiracy theories?"
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 ...
8 Jul 202453min
Ep65 "Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks?"
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 min...
1 Jul 20241h 7min
Ep64 "Why do familiar things lose their shine (& what can we do about it)? "
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? W...
24 Jun 202451min
