219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity

219 | Dani Bassett and Perry Zurn on the Neuroscience and Philosophy of Curiosity

It's easy enough to proclaim that we are curious creatures, but what does that really mean? What kinds of curiosity are there? And how does curiosity arise in our brains? Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett are a philosopher and neuroscientist, respectively (as well as twins), whose new book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection explores these questions through an interdisciplinary lens. We break down the different ways that curiosity can manifest — collecting and creating loose knowledge networks, digging deeply to create a tight knowledge network, and creatively leaping to make unexpected connections.

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Perry Zurn received a Ph.D. in philosophy from DePaul University. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. He is the co-founder of the Trans Philosophy Project and the associated Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference. Among his previous works is Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry.


Dani Bassett received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. They are currently the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry, as well as an external professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Among their awards are the Macarthur Fellowship, the Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), and the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science.


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Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Holiday Message 2019: On Publishing Books

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what's on my mind. Since the big event for me in ...

22 Dec 20191h 6min

77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer

77 | Azra Raza on The Way We Should Fight Cancer

In the United States, more than one in five deaths is caused by cancer. The medical community has put enormous resources into fighting this disease, yet its causes and best treatments continue to be a...

16 Dec 20191h 22min

76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature

76 | Ned Hall on Possible Worlds and the Laws of Nature

It's too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won't be pushing us away tomorrow? We extrapolate from past experience to future...

9 Dec 20191h 25min

75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse

75 | Max Tegmark on Reality, Simulation, and the Multiverse

We've talked a lot recently about the Many Worlds of quantum mechanics. That's one kind of multiverse that physicists often contemplate. There is also the cosmological multiverse, which we talked abou...

2 Dec 20191h 11min

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, and Cultural Poetics

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical...

25 Nov 20191h 6min

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

73 | Grimes (c) on Music, Creativity, and Digital Personae

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated...

18 Nov 20191h 18min

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

72 | César Hidalgo on Information in Societies, Economies, and the Universe

Maxwell's Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do ...

11 Nov 20191h 16min

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere

The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It's hardly surprising that we don't understand the mind and how it w...

4 Nov 20191h 34min

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