Rethinking the "wood wide web"
Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast underground...
3 Okt 20241h 16min
Electric ecology
There's a bit of a buzz out there, right now, but maybe you haven't noticed. It's in the water, it's in the air. It's electricity—and it's all around us, all the time, including in some places you mig...
19 Sep 20241h 33min
The nature of nurture
The idea of a "maternal instinct"—the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary—what you might call "paternal aloofness....
5 Sep 20241h 16min
The space of (possibly) sentient beings
We may not know what it's like to be a bat, but we're pretty confident that it's like something—that bats (and other mammals) are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and pain, cold and warmth, agit...
22 Aug 20241h 7min
From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation
Hi friends, we're still on a brief summer break. We'll have a new episode for you later in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired September 21, 2022] If yo...
7 Aug 20241h 17min
From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know?
Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired January 25, 2023] By no...
24 Jul 202455min
From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering
Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired May 17, 2023] You know...
10 Jul 20241h 2min
A new picture of language
If you've taken Linguistics 101, you know what language is. It's a system for conveying meaning through speech. We build words out of sounds, and then complex ideas out of those words. Remarkably, the...
26 Jun 20241h 55min
