John Krakauer Part 2: Learning, Curiosity, and Consciousness
What makes us human? Over the last several decades, the once-vast island of human exceptionalism has lost significant ground to wave upon wave of research revealing cognition, emotion, problem-solvin...
23 Nov 202249min
John Krakauer Part 1: Taking Multiple Perspectives on The Brain
The brain is arguably one of the most complex objects known to science. How best to understand it? That is a trick question: brains are organized at many levels and attempts to grasp them all through ...
11 Nov 202251min
David Wolpert & Farita Tasnim on The Thermodynamics of Communication
Communication is a physical process. It’s common sense that sending and receiving intelligible messages takes work…but how much work? The question of the relationship between energy, information, and ...
21 Okt 20221h 6min
Kate Adamala on Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, and Bioethics
What does it mean to be alive? Our origins are the horizon of our understanding, and as with the physical horizon, our approach brings us no closer. The more we learn, the more mysterious it all becom...
1 Okt 20221h 9min
Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
One way to frame the science of complexity is as a revelation of the hidden order under seemingly separate phenomena — a teasing-out of music from the noise of history and nature. This effort follows ...
21 Sep 202257min
Steven Teles & Rajiv Sethi on Jailbreaking The Captured Economy (EPE 04)
As the old nut goes, “To the victor goes the spoils.” But if each round of play consolidates the spoils into fewer hands, eventually it comes to pass that wealthy special interests twist the rules so ...
2 Sep 20221h 11min
Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome
Chances are you’re listening to this on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket, but is really just one tentacle tip of a giant, planet-spanning architecture for the gathering and processing of ...
19 Aug 20221h 22min
Daniel Lieberman on Evolution and Exercise: The Science of Human Endurace
Human beings are distinctly weird. We live for a very long time after we stop reproducing, move completely differently than all of our closest relatives, lack the power of chimpanzees and other primat...
3 Aug 202252min
