Ep77 "What is Life?"
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 expe...
23 Sep 202450min
Ep76 "How do you decide?" (Part 2)
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 soc...
16 Sep 202441min
Ep75 "How do you decide?" (Part 1)
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 ...
9 Sep 202432min
Ep74 "Why do we laugh?"
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, magic...
2 Sep 202442min
Ep73 "How do we fool ourselves in the stock market?"
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 bia...
26 Aug 202450min
Ep72 "How do you put yourself in other people's shoes (and can AI do it)?"
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 ...
19 Aug 202442min
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
