Podcasts · Science · Health & Fitness

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

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191 episodes

Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman discusses how our brain interprets the world and what that means for us. Through storytelling, research, interviews, and experiments, David Eagleman tackles wild questions that illuminate new facets of our lives and our realities.

Episodes page 1 of 4

  1. Re-Release "What is color? Part 1: Why hunters wear orange"

    · 38 min

    This week we reach into the archive for one of the most popular episodes of Inner Cosmos. Why do birds and bees choose different flowers? Why do mammals' eyes seem to be optimized for moving around at night, and what…

  2. Ep175 Who Are You When Your Brain Changes? with Robert Kolker

    · 43 min · Episode 175

    Is your personality written into the circuitry of your brain? With brain disease, can someone lose who they are without realizing it? What happens when the person changing is the only one who can't see it? What does it…

  3. Ep174 "Can Evolution Teach AI?" with Athena Aktipis

    · 53 min · Episode 174

    How do you get trillions of cells to collaborate as the single organism that we call you? Does that kind of cooperation create opportunities for hijacking -- for example, is cancer a form of "cellular cheating"? Can we…

  4. Re-Release "Why Do Brains Dream"

    · 52 min

    This week we reach into the archive for one of the most popular episodes of Inner Cosmos. Why do brains dream, and why are dreams so bizarre? Why doesn't your clock work in your dreams? And even though you spend much…

  5. Ep173 "Why Do We Have Emotions?" with Robert Kurzban

    · 54 min · Episode 173

    What's a feeling for? What is jealousy measuring and motivating? Why do both awe and grief slow us down? What happens when ancient emotions meet dating apps and like buttons? Does the intensity of a feeling decide…

  6. Ep172 "Can You Quantify Yourself to Improve Health?" with Michael Snyder

    · 1 h 03 min · Episode 172

    Can your smartwatch detect subtle changes before you feel them? Might a continuous glucose monitor pick up on things you didn’t know about yourself? Could a drop of blood map your future health? Why does your personal…

  7. Ep171 "Why Do Some Urges Feel Irresistible?" with Paige Gordon

    · 46 min · Episode 171

    Why do two people facing the same choice feel different urges? How much effort hides behind resisting a cookie? Why can the brain keep wanting something long after pleasure fades? Can a molecule crank down the volume…

  8. Ep 170 "Will Mars Create a New Species of Human?" with Scott Solomon

    · 49 min · Episode 170

    What happens when we start birthing babies on Mars? Might a Martian human become unable to survive on Earth because of differences in microbes and gravity? How much of your body is shaped by the details of this planet?…

  9. Ep169 "What Is Claude Thinking But Not Saying?" with Jack Lindsey

    · 1 h 21 min

    Is AI thinking things it never says aloud? How would we know if a large language model were having a subjective experience? Is there a way to read the 'thoughts' of an LLM? Human brains seem to have a 'global…

  10. Ep168 "Will it Someday Make Sense to Elect an AI President?"

    · 46 min · Episode 168

    Could there be a better form of government than the one we have now? As we enter an AI-powered world, when might we choose an AI leader? Will your grandchildren ever vote for a human president, who comes with a…

  11. Ep167 "What Happens With Stone Age Brains + Godlike Tools?" with Steven Kotler

    · 39 min · Episode 167

    What happens when old brain circuitry collides with modern tech? Are we heading into an age of abundance, and can abundance create its own psychological problems? Do we need friction in our lives to become better…

  12. Ep166 "Could the Next Brain Interface Get Sprayed Up Your Nose?" with Tetiana Aleksandrova & Scott Meek

    · 48 min · Episode 166

    A brain computer interface (BCI) is any technology that allows you to connect your 3 pounds of wetware to a computer. But instead of implanting electrodes via neurosurgery, might the next revolution in BCIs come from…

  13. Ep165 "What's a Doom Loop & How Do You Escape It?" with Jonathan Downar

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 165

    Have you ever spent hours with a thought cycling around in your head? What happens when the brain continuously worries, craves, or replays something without finding the exit? Where does the feeling of being “done” come…

  14. Ep164 "Why Do We Act Differently Around Different People?" With Claude Steele

    · 1 h 11 min · Episode 164

    Does your identity and performance change in different situations? What does this have to do with wondering how you’re being judged? What if polarization grows from uncertainty more than hatred? Might social…

  15. Ep163 "How Quickly Does AI Become Smarter Than Humanity?" with Ben Goertzel

    · 1 h 09 min · Episode 163

    What is artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how close are we to getting there? What defines the next step, called artificial superintelligence (ASI), and why might the gap between those two be so dangerous? When…

  16. Ep162 "What Does Medicine Look Like in Ten Years?" with Jeanne Loring

    · 34 min

    For all of medical history, we’ve tried to persuade sick cells to behave better. What if instead we just swapped them out? Can we insert new brain cells grown from your own skin cells? And what does any of this have to…

  17. Ep161 "What Do Ancient Brains and Future AIs Have in Common?" with Read Montague

    · 1 h 03 min · Episode 161

    What do honeybee brains have in common with human brains -- and with the AI that beat the world's best Go player? What simple algorithm has been hiding inside brains for 100s of millions of years? When babies throw…

  18. Ep160 "Do You Really Have a Self?" with Sam Harris

    · 1 h 07 min

    re you the author of your thoughts or just their witness? Do we simply watch our thoughts like we watch unfolding dream plots? What if the most familiar thing you experience — yourself — isn’t really there? If that’s…

  19. Ep159 "If Your Brain Changed Slightly, Would You Still Be You?" with Masud Husain

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 159

    Could a tiny injury to your brain change your personality? If your friends didn’t know something had happened in your brain, would they just think you're choosing to act strangely? What if the self is nothing but a…

  20. Ep158 "What do babies, animals, and AI have in common?" with Melanie Mitchell

    · 45 min · Episode 158

    When AI gets the right answer, how do we know it got there the right way? Why do we assume that fluent language means intelligence? What do infants and chatbots have in common? What do AI’s mistakes teach us about our…

  21. Ep157 "Where Did the Letter "A" Come From?" with Danny Bate

    · 54 min · Episode 157

    How can we use 26 symbols to capture everything in the cosmos of human experience? Where do our written symbols in English come from? What ancient ghosts are still hiding inside the letters you read every day? Does…

  22. Ep156 What Do We Learn About AI by Dancing with Robots? with Catie Cuan

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 156

    Why do we read so much into how a robot moves, and what does that tell us about human brains? Why did our history make us so sensitive to movement? Why do we trust graceful motion? Should we make a robot 'look' at an…

  23. Ep155 "Why Can’t Some People Stop Thinking Certain Thoughts?" with Jon Hershfield

    · 1 h 02 min · Episode 155

    Why do brains generate strange thoughts sometimes? And why do some brains refuse to let go of those thoughts? Today we'll talk about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) with expert Jon Hershfield, getting a view from…

  24. Ep154 "Can a Depressed Brain Find Its Way Out?" with Jon Nelson

    · 1 h 31 min · Episode 154

    What if your brain got stuck in sadness and never reset? What does it feel like when joy disappears completely? Can a person love their family deeply and still want to die? What do you do when treatment after treatment…

  25. Ep153 Can You Unlearn Anxiety? with Judson Brewer

    · 59 min · Episode 153

    Week 2 of Mental Health Awareness month: Anxiety is close to everyone’s experience, either because you've had it or someone close to you has. Does your brain accidentally teach itself to stay anxious by looping on the…

  26. Ep152 "How do you survive your own thoughts?" with Jewel

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 152

    What do you do when your own mind stops feeling safe? How does a person sing on stage while panicking inside? How do you catch your thoughts before they catch you? Join Eagleman with singer/songwriter Jewel to talk…

  27. Ep151 "Can One Be a Rational Optimist About the World?" with Matt Ridley

    · 57 min · Episode 151

    Why do we generally feel like the world is getting worse, when by almost all measures it’s getting better? How do ideas "have sex”, and why does that matter for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically misread…

  28. Ep150 "Can We Engineer Dreams?" with Adam Haar Horowitz

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 150

    Can you influence what you dream about tonight? Are you spending years of your life in a world you don’t recall? Can nightmares be manipulated as a therapy? Are dreams sometimes predictive of changes in your health…

  29. Ep149 "What makes a brain grow up resilient?" with David Sussillo

    · 51 min

    How can a brain grow up in chaos but find its way to order? There are many ways to have a bad childhood, but why do some children break while others bend and keep going? How much of who you are is written in your genes…

  30. Ep148 "How can we improve political dialog?" with Saul Perlmutter

    · 55 min · Episode 148

    How can we improve political dialogue, and what does this have to do with the discovery that the universe behaves differently than expected? Why do we cling to beliefs even when evidence pushes against them? What if…

  31. Ep147 "Can we engineer human thought?" with Tom Griffiths

    · 50 min · Episode 147

    Can the mind be captured with math? Modern AI seems to have burst out of the gate recently, but is it actually the latest chapter in a 300-year project to turn thought into something we can model? Why does current AI…

  32. Ep146 "Who Counts as Human in Your Mind?" with Lasana Harris

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 146

    When do you view another person like an object? This is what neuroscientists mean when they talk about de-humanization: your brain doesn't crank up its social circuitry to understand the other person as having a mind…

  33. Ep145 Why do we compulsively click on ragebait? with Angele Christin

    · 1 h 10 min · Episode 145

    Do algorithms shape our lives? What did clickbait look like before the internet? Why do journalists start writing differently when metrics are introduced? What does any of this have to do with cooking pasta in the…

  34. Ep144 "How do things last?" Part 2: Millennia with Alexander Rose

    · 56 min

    What is a 10,000 year clock? What is the Y10k bug? What allows some organizations to last a millennium? What do ancient ceramics have to do with ball bearings in satellites? What does any of this have to do with…

  35. Ep143 "How do things last?" Part 1: neurons to civilizations

    · 44 min · Episode 143

    What makes things last, and what do very different lasting things have in common? Why might a space alien not be able to understand music? Why do windows in medieval cathedrals look thicker at the bottom, and what does…

  36. Ep142 "Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers?" with Eric Weinstein

    · 1 h 33 min · Episode 142

    Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and…

  37. Ep141 "What do brains and weather systems have in common?" with Nicole Rust

    · 37 min · Episode 141

    Does brain science need a new grand plan? Is the brain less like an assembly line and more like a weather system? What does this mean for what counts as explanatory, and how might AI help us in the near future? What…

  38. Ep140 "How does your brain decide what’s true?" with Sam Harris

    · 1 h 21 min · Episode 140

    Why do we believe what we believe? Why is changing our opinions so difficult, and why does a challenged belief so often feel like a personal attack? What if beliefs didn’t evolve to be true, but to be socially useful?…

  39. Ep139 "What does alignment look like in a society of AIs?" with Danielle Perszyk

    · 58 min · Episode 139

    Is intelligence a property of individual brains, or is it something that emerges from many brains trying to align with one another? How can we build AI agents to improve our understanding of the world and to mediate…

  40. Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion for truth?" with Kaizen Asiedu

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 138

    What if your confidence in your political beliefs does not correlate with their accuracy? Why does a pundit's outrage often feel so convincing and nuance so unsatisfying? Are conspiracy theories a predictable feature…

  41. Ep137 "Do cures ever create the next crisis?" with Thomas Goetz

    · 47 min · Episode 137

    Medications are among the most important advancements of science, but their social consequences are often complex. What if some of our most common diseases are design flaws of modern life? Does it matter if we're…

  42. Ep136 "Why do we care about mattering?" with Rebecca Goldstein

    · 42 min · Episode 136

    What does it mean for your life to matter? We all talk a lot about happiness, pleasure, and meaning... but what if the real engine underneath it all is the need to feel we count? Is it possible that depression,…

  43. Ep135: What does neuroscience mean by hypnosis? with David Spiegel

    · 55 min · Episode 135

    What exactly is hypnosis? We’ve all heard of circus-like versions, but is there a real element to hypnosis that psychiatrists and neuroscientists are able to leverage? Can attention and expectation change what we feel…

  44. Ep82 Re Broadcast "Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?" Part 1

    · 29 min · Episode 82

    Happy Holidays- New Episodes starting Jan. 5th Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though you're the same person you were a month ago? What does this have to do…

  45. Ep70 Re Broadcast "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts"

    · 34 min · Episode 70

    Happy Holidays- New episodes starting Jan. 5th Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American folklore, eyewitness memory of a car accident, or what a person…

  46. Ep134 "What do brains teach us about morality?" with Joshua Greene

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 134

    Why will you make different moral decisions in similar circumstances? Why do some people make different choices than you? What happens when ancient moral instincts collide with modern problems such as pandemics, AI…

  47. Ep133 "Why do people hold misbeliefs?" with Dan Ariely

    · 47 min · Episode 133

    Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously false from the outside, as with conspiracy theories? Is this kind of misbelief a universal feature of human brains? Does it offer clarity and belonging when…

  48. Ep132 "What will AI mean for the economy?" with Andrew Mayne

    · 51 min · Episode 132

    If AI can do everything from writing novels to designing proteins, what remains that only humans can do? What's the human advantage in a world where machines can outperform us at almost any measurable task? What does…

  49. Ep131 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 2: Rehumanization

    · 49 min · Episode 131

    How do societies work their way out of polarization? And what does the answer have to do with broken trucks, the Apollo program, the movie 'Watchmen', Iroquois Native Americans, a new idea for social media algorithms,…

  50. Ep130 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 1: Polarization

    · 46 min · Episode 130

    What do propaganda posters have in common across nation and time, and how is that related to the medial prefrontal cortex? What is behind repeating cycles of societal polarization? What does any of this have to do with…

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