Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Why do we have so much circuitry in the brain devoted to faces? Why does your electrical plug seem to look like a little face? Did aliens plant a signal for us on Mars, or are we looking at a quirk of our own brains? What is face blindness and what is a super recognizer? What does any of this have to do with looking at a magazine upside down, or why computer algorithms sometimes think a jack-o'-lantern is a person? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into something so fundamental as to be typically invisible.

The brain easily forms ingroups and outgroups – and shows different responses when viewing one or the other. At the extreme, the brain stops seeing outgroup members as people, but more like objects. But are there ways to rehumanize? And in this context, what do heroes look like? In this episode, Eagleman talks with two men -- Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah -- one Israeli and one Palestinian. The two men, full of pain and sorrow, are fighting. But they are fighting side by side. They are fighting to repair the future. Learn what peacebuilders are, how they function, and what this has to do with the neuroscience of dehumanization, ingroups, outgroups, and the possibilities -- both political and neural -- for rehumanization.

Why do you sometimes feel that you trust this person but not that one -- for reasons you can't quite put your finger on? What signals does the brain vacuum up in your daily life, and what fraction of those does your conscious mind have access to? When does intuition steer us wrong? And what is the future of intuition, as we build new technologies to take the myriad signals racing around in the dark of our brains and bodies and bring them to light? Join Eagleman and his guest, cognitive neuroscientist Joel Pearson, to unpack when to trust and when to ignore the signals of intuition.

Why do we believe our own truths so strongly? What is steel-manning, and why is it so important? What does any of this have to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, or the future of our society? This week's episode deals with polarization and what we might do about it. Join Eagleman and his guest Isaac Saul, who works to represent different points of view in his newsletter Tangle -- all in the name of the intellectual humility that can blossom from grappling with conflicting ideas.

How do brains picture things internally, and how might you and I imagine differently? How have recent discoveries completely changed the debate and the way we understand internal experience? What does this have to do with Disney's Fantasia, or Pixar's aphantasia? Strap in for some very wild surprises today about our internal experiences, with guest Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar Studios.

From a neuroscience point of view, what is creativity? How does it shine light on the current lawsuits over large language models and whether they produce anything fundamentally new... or are simply remixing the old? How do the arts expose something important about what's happening in the human brain? What do we know about the cultural evolution of ideas? And what does any of this have to do with how cell phones got their names, and why koala bears don’t write novels? Join Eagleman and his guest, composer Anthony Brandt, as they uncover the surprises about creativity.

Can we measure a lie from a blood pressure test, or pedophilia from a brain scan? And how should a judge decide whether the technology is good enough? What does this have to do with Ronald Reagan, or antisocial personality disorder, or how the television show CSI has impacted courtrooms? Today’s episode lives at the intersection of brains and the legal system. When are new neuroscience techniques allowed in courts, and when should they be?

David is taking his birthday week off and wanted to re-share this episode due to it's ongoing relevance. Modern AI is blowing everyone’s mind. But is it intelligent like humans, or is it just playing impressive statistical games? Could AI reach or exceed our level of intelligence, and how would we know when it gets there? Traditional tests for intelligence (Turing test, Lovelace test, etc) have long been surpassed, so Eagleman proposes a new kind of test.

Why does a cold pool feel warmer the second time you dip your toes in? Why does a safecracker run his fingers over sandpaper? Why do Mediterranean cultures touch each other more than Scandinavian cultures? Would it be great -- or not so great -- if you were unable to feel physical pain? Why does stubbing your toe have different sensations through time? And what does any of this have to do with cuddle puddles, NBA players bumping chests, or puppies sleeping in dog piles? Today’s episode is a love story about our sense of touch: what it is, how it works, and why it plays such a critical role in our lives.

Could you instantaneously learn to fly a helicopter -- not by practicing, but instead by uploading instructions directly to your brain? What would society do if children no longer had to go to school? And what does any of this have to do with suntan booths, nanorobots, or what a cowboy on a hill is not able to see? Join Eagleman to learn about the possibility of modifying the microscopic structure of your brain and leapfrogging education. What are the possibilities, the caveats, and the unexpected complexities?

From the brain’s point of view, what is the self? How do 30 trillion cells come to feel like a single entity? Does the "self" of a blind person include the tip of her walking stick? How flexible is our sense of self? And what does any of this have to do with psychedelics, trauma, synchronized swimmers, religious rituals, cheerleaders, or why soldiers across time and place love to march in lockstep? Join Eagleman for this week's episode of surprises about how the brain computes the self.

Presumably we're not going to solve the problem of conflict between groups of people -- but what would better conflict look like? And what does that have to do with brains, the spread of homo sapiens, social media recommender algorithms, tribalism, intellectual humility, or the Iroquois Native Americans? Join this week's episode with guest Jonathan Stray -- a conflict researcher -- for an episode about brain science, war, empathy, outgroups, and how we might do better.

Can you become conscious inside a dream? Can a researcher convey information to a dreamer, and can the dreamer find some way to answer back? Does 10 seconds inside a dream equal 10 seconds in real life? Could taking a drug inside a dream give you a placebo effect? Can you prompt your brain like a large language model? And if so, what would you pose to your unconscious brain? Join David Eagleman and guest Jonathan Berent to discover the what, why, and how of lucid dreaming.

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 of your working day looking at your cell phone and computer – why do they almost never make appearances in your dream content? Is dream content the same across cultures and across time? Are dreams experienced in black & white, or in color? Are dreams the strange love child of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet? What is the relationship between schizophrenia and dreaming? In the future, will we be able to read out the content of somebody's dream? Join Eagleman this week to learn why and how we spend a fraction of our sleep time locked in different realities, swimming in plots which aren't real but which compel us entirely nonetheless.

Why do we spend 1/3 of our lives in the strange doppelganger state of sleep? Can we die from a lack of sleep? How long is it possible to keep yourself awake (and why does the Guinness Book of World Records no longer track that)? Why are some people night owls and some morning larks? What does any of this have to do with lightless underground caves, or with the length of a day on Mars? Join this week's episode to learn everything you've ever wanted to know about sleep and what your brain is actually doing during this time. This is the first of a 3-parter: next week we'll dive into dreams, and the week after that into lucid dreams.

Could you get convicted of a crime based on your brain activity? Are brain scan lie detectors accepted in court, or would that count as illegal search and seizure? And what does this have to do with your mouth getting dry, the orbits under your eyes getting hot, and your voice constricting when you deceive? Join Eagleman to dive into the fascinating topic of whether societies can use technology to figure out whether a person is telling the truth -- and under what circumstances we would even want to go there.

What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what does any of this have to do with measuring depression medications in city water supplies, reward pathways in the brain, the prevalence of tuberculosis, and zapping the head with magnetic stimulation? Join today's episode with David Eagleman and his guest -- psychiatrist Jonathan Downar -- for a deep dive into the brain science behind depression and what new solutions are on the horizon.

Do our visual systems see in frames like a movie camera or instead analyze the world continuously? Why do you see multiple hands when you clap under yellow street lamps? How did Hollywood launch from the question of whether all four legs of a galloping horse come off the ground at once? And what is the very surprising thing that happens if you stare at your ceiling fan for a long time while it turns? This week’s episode is about visual perception -- and a series of eye-opening revelations about how the brain takes in information from the world.

Can a person be declared legally dead even though he is very much alive? In December of 2010, why did a number of families choose to pull their loved ones off life support just before the new year? How do doctors decide when you've died, and how is it different from how lawyers decide? How is death a process rather than an event? What does any of this have to do with getting buried alive, your family's religious beliefs, or whether a head stays alive after the guillotine? Join Eagleman and guest Jacob Appel, an emergency room psychiatrist and head of ethics, for an episode about the science and the questions about death -- including who's domain it is to call it, and where this is all heading.

Who is the most disappointed medalist at the Olympics? How do brains simulate what might have been? How can you get your kid to wear a jacket in the cold? What if you had to face more successful versions of yourself? And what does any of this have to do with why menus should be shorter, why empires divide, and why you should always put yourself in the shoes of future people? Join Eagleman to learn the capstone secrets of mental time travel, and what these have to do with the emotions of regret and relief.

Why are people who can't remember their past also unable to picture their future? Why do we get so anxious about the world changing around us? What should you advise the president if we find ourselves at war with extraterrestrials? And what does this have to do with Wayne Gretzky, or the Greek goddess of memory, or hitting a bottle to get ketchup onto your French fries? Join this week's episode to find out about one of the most important things brains do: simulations of possible futures.

How do billions of neurons store your home address, your ability to ride a bike, and the history of your life? How does memory work in the brain, and how is it different from the way a computer stores information? And what does any of this have to do with the Happy Birthday song, squirrels hiding acorns, bards memorizing epics, or people who cannot forget any of the events of their life? Join Eagleman to learn how and why your brain continually time travels to previous moments.

What role will AI play in the future of fake news and misinformation? What does this have to do with our brains’ internal models, with voice passwords, and with what Eagleman calls "the tall intelligence problem"? And why does he believe that these earliest days of AI are its golden age, and we are quickly heading for a balkanization? Join for today's episode about truth, misinformation, and artificial intelligence.

What is the future of misinformation on the internet? Is it possible that the invention of the internet has improved access to truth? What does any of this have to do with the Oxford English Dictionary, Soviet agriculture, liberation technology, Kenyan elections, Barbra Streisand's house, and Twitter revolutions? Join Eagleman for a surprising foray into the thorny forest of truth in the age of the internet.

We all worry about fake news. But is misinformation and disinformation really new? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of truth. Why do cameras not tell us what we think they do? What should we not forget about pamphleteering? And what does this have to do with agriculture in the USSR, or book banning in America, or dog whistles, or apps that only tell facts? And why is it so hard to understand the viewpoints of millions of brains at once? This week's episode is the first of a three-parter -- and today we tackle truth in the media.

Why are our brains so wired for love? Could you fall head over heels for a bot? Might your romantic partner be more satisfied with a 5% better version of you? How does an AI bot plug right into your deep neural circuitry, and what are the pros and cons? And what will it mean when humans you love don’t have to die, but can live on in your phone forever? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into relationships, their AI future, and what it all means for our species.

Is it always harder to teach an old dog new tricks? Why is an older person slower to learn a new language but able to learn new faces easily? Why does Arnold Schwartzenegger have an accent but Mila Kunis doesn’t, even though neither spoke English as a child? Why is there a correlation between how tall a person is and how much salary they're likely to earn? What would it mean to say that you are born as many people but die as a single one? This week's episode dives into surprises about brain plasticity and why your flexibility changes throughout your lifetime.

What does the insanity defense mean in a court of law? And is there such a thing as temporary insanity? Is the twinkie defense a real thing? Can someone use premenstrual syndrome as a defense? And what does the legal wrestling around insanity tell us about the differences between brains: yours and other people’s, or even yours one day and yours the next day? How does law comport with science, and how are they sometimes like two people with quite different ways of looking at the world? Join to find out what happened to Andrea Yates, how the legal system deals with mental illness, and so much more.

Eagleman answers listeners questions.

What is the insanity defense? Are some people’s brains so different that it makes sense to use a different legal category? How does a legal system decide where the dividing line is? How are science and law strange bedfellows? Join us for the first of two episodes about the insanity defense: where it comes from, where it's going, and why it is so difficult to decide where to draw our societal lines.

f you look at a brain, how can you immediately tell if it belongs to a piano player or a violinist? How can a dog learn how to walk on its rear legs? And what does this have to do with expertise, or the good news about the brains of digital natives, or how governments respond to change just like brains do? While we all like to talk about brain plasticity, the truth is that most of what happens in your life makes no meaningful change to your brain. So what’s the difference between the stuff that sticks and the stuff that doesn’t?

What would it be like to have a much lower or higher IQ than you currently have -- for example, to be a squirrel or an advanced space alien? This week's episode is about intelligence. What is it and what is its history and future? Join Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of several schools of thought about what intelligence might mean in the brain.

Why do they use a gun at the Olympics? And why can you get off the blocks after the bang but still be disqualified for jumping the gun? Few things are as bizarre as our time perception. From sprinters to basketball players, from Kubla Khan to Oppenheimer, from television broadcasting to hallucinations, Eagleman unmasks illusions of time that surround us. Why does the brain work so hard to pull off editing tricks? And what does this tell us about our perception of reality?

Does life end inevitably or instead only because we don’t understand biology well enough yet? Today’s episode is about understanding what happens when your molecular cycles grind to a halt... and whether there's anything we can do to hit control-Z. Join Eagleman and his guest Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja to dive into the weird possibility of understanding cells well enough to reverse death.

Eagleman answers listeners questions.

Why can you hear some sounds two different ways, depending on which word you’re looking at? Why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face? How can you have rich visual experience with your eyes closed? Are some crosswalk buttons fake? Why are some pictures interpretable only once you’ve been told what to look for? And although brains are often celebrated for their parallel processing, what should they really be celebrated for? Tune in to learn what happens when the raw facts of the world collide with your expectations.

Can we explain our rich experience of life only by studying the molecules that compose us? How is the color of your passport related to your chances of presenting with schizophrenia? Males are more predisposed to commit crime, so why don’t all males commit crime? And what does any of this have to do with traffic jams, why Seinfeld is funny, and how we’re ever going to come to know ourselves from studying biology? Join Eagleman to talk about levels of understanding, what a meaningful explanation would look like, and the possibility that we are not near the conclusion of science's journey, but instead near the beginning.

Did Joan of Arc turn the tide of the 100 Years War as the result of a brain disorder? Would you appreciate Taylor Swift if you only had an internal camera to watch her vocal chords? What do almost all drugs of abuse have in common? How can the tiny molecules of rabies virus control your behavior? Join Eagleman on a two-part deep dive into the fundamental question of how biological insights can shed light on the ancient question of who we are.

Are there really dozens of words for snow in northern cultures? What did the movie Arrival have to do with language and cognition? Why are Russians better than Americans at distinguishing certain shades of blue? And what does any of this have to do with space, time, gender, and how your language influences your thought? Join Eagleman and his guest, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, as they take a deep dive into the intersection of words and understanding.

Can your thoughts be read with neurotechnology? When is measuring the brain like reading the mind? How close or far are we from being able to know if you're thinking about some particular thing you did or intend to do? What's hype and what's real? Join Eagleman for a deep dive into mind reading: what it means, where we are now, and whether your thoughts could ever be readable with new technologies.

We all know people who hate the word "moist". But why are they fine with synonyms such as "damp" or "wet"? What’s going on in their brains, and what does this have to do with synesthesia, autism, shapes, slacks, and sound probabilities? Join this week's episode as Eagleman leads us into the new and wild world of word aversion.

Why are we humans so easily deceived? What are the tricks of the trade, and how can we train ourselves to be more aware of them? What does all this have to do with Theranos, forged letters, and the shell game? Although you presumably wouldn't cheat a stranger out of all her money, there are people who would -- so how can we beef up our immunity against deception? Join Eagleman with guests Christopher Chabris and Dan Simons to discuss their new book, Nobody's Fool.

Why do you still feel the waves after getting off a boat? Why does the wall seem to come at you faster after you step off the treadmill? Why do the rocks seem to move upward after you stare at a waterfall? Why did people in the 1980s think their book pages had some red color in them… but no one thought that before or after the 80s? And what does any of this have to do with drugs, heartbreak, yellow sunglasses, or Aristotle watching a horse stuck in a river? Join Eagleman to understand how the brain constantly readjusts its circuitry to best read the world, and what it means for our (sometimes strange) perceptions of what's out there.

If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they're saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet... and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon.

Why do briefly glimpsed people appear to be more attractive? Why did portrait photographers put Vaseline on their lenses, and what does that have to do with Instagram filters? Why are thirsty people more likely to perceive something as transparent? And what does any of that have to do with mating, optimal decision making, puberty, frogs, and movie stars? In this episode, Eagleman gets us to view the familiar as strange as we examine beauty, instincts, and what drives us.

Would you torture someone if you were commanded by an authority figure? To what degree are your decisions contextual, and what does this have to do with matching the length of a line, the Iroquois Native Americans, the banality of evil, soldiers posing with dead bodies of their enemies, propaganda, giving shocks to a stranger, or how we should educate our children? Join Eagleman for part 2 of the exploration into brains, dehumanization, and what we can do to improve our possible future.

Why do we so naturally form ingroups and outgroups? And what does that have to do with evolution, monkeys, Greeks, psychopaths, Syndrome E, and propaganda posters? Join Eagleman to learn why our brains are so wired for tribalism, what the consequences are for the world, and how a bit of knowledge goes a long way to making us more immune to propaganda.

How good is your memory, really? Why do we feel so certain about our memory, even while it is so suspect? Can something told to you after an event change your memory of the event? Why is it so hard to reconstruct a face? Is there a relationship between confidence and accuracy? How is your ability to remember a scene changed if there's a gun pointed at you? Join Eagleman to find out why eyewitness testimony is the most questionable technology we allow in courts.

How would we know if we were living in a simulation? What if you were a butterfly having a dream it was a human? What does any of this have to do with John Lennon, or Renee Descartes, or freezing yourself in a vat of liquid nitrogen? How will we eventually solve the problem that human bodies can’t do space travel? Join Eagleman for a wild ride into the strange possibility of making brains immortal.

How do your billions of tiny brain cells build consciousness as they chatter away with electrical spikes and chemical signals? And why is your laptop, with its sophisticated algorithms and billions of parts, presumably not conscious? Could other large systems like a city become conscious? And what does this have to do with ant hills, blue birds, or your memory of your first kiss? Join Eagleman on a journey into one of the central mysteries of neuroscience: why we have awareness.