Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly

Physics is extremely good at describing simple systems with relatively few moving parts. Sadly, the world is not like that; many phenomena of interest are complex, with multiple interacting parts and ...

6 Sep 20211h 31min

There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It's therefore interesting to see how our brains actually go about solving problems. Here's ...

30 Aug 20211h 14min

Economies in the modern world are incredibly complex systems. But when we sit down to think about them in quantitative ways, it's natural to keep things simple at first. We look for reliable relations...

23 Aug 20211h 35min

Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical period also witnessed the foundation of some of the...

16 Aug 20211h 23min

Welcome to the August 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of ques...

12 Aug 20213h 11min

Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through our thoughts and emotions, not to mention the mean...

9 Aug 20211h 49min

The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memory, aging, cause and effect) to deep questions in phys...

2 Aug 20211h 47min

Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can't help but wonder whether we could do better. Using existing genomes as a starting point, b...

26 Jul 20211h 17min