Many Minds

To be a good magician, you have to be a good psychologist. If you want to pull off a really good magic trick, you need to know your audience—what they are likely to attend to or gloss over, what short...

2 Mars 202240min

I have this theory about podcasts—it's almost certainly not original, and it's probably not right. But anyway, I have this theory that what makes for a great podcast episode is really just a few good ...

16 Feb 202228min

You have a big brain. I have a big brain. We, as a species, have pretty big brains. But this wasn't always the case. Way back when, our brains were much smaller; then they went through a bit of growth...

2 Feb 202246min

You've probably seen those lists of the so-called "wonders of the world." Many are works of architecture: the Great Wall, the pyramids, the colosseum, Taj Mahal. But these lists are, in a sense, alway...

19 Jan 202258min

We're on a brief winter break right now, but we'll be back later in January. To tide you over, here's one of our favorite episodes from 2021: a conversation with Dr. Luke Rendell about culture in whal...

7 Jan 20221h 16min

A pharmacologist and a philosopher walk into a bar. This is not the start of a joke—it's the start of our 2021 finale and our first ever theme episode. The idea with these theme episodes is that we ha...

22 Dec 20211h 19min

You may not remember much about it, but chances are last night you went on a journey. As you slept, your brain concocted a story—maybe a sprawl of interconnected stories. It took you to some unreal pl...

8 Dec 202148min

I'm betting you've heard about the next generation of artificial intelligence, the one that's just around the corner. It's going to be pervasive, all-competent, maybe super-intelligent. We'll rely on ...

24 Nov 202153min