btrmt. lectures

The most-listened-to neuroscience on the planet is a magic trick. Attach a brain part to any bit of ordinary advice and it starts to feel like science. Here’s how the trick works—and how to run it in reverse, so you never fall for it again. Further reading The Neuroscience Con — the article behind this lecture Neurotransmitters and behaviour — the purest form of the trick Addictive work — where ne...

Go and watch a tape of a so-called charismatic cult leader and the charisma everyone swears is there simply isn’t on it—just an odd bloke with a staring problem. So where does it come from? Not the leader. The followers confer it, and the leader is only ever an emblem they gather around. Which is why the cult runs itself when he’s a continent away, and why Musk stayed an icon no matter how many pr...

Two ordinary people suddenly go insane together. It’s a premise we enjoy from a safe distance—because surely it could never be us. I’m not so sure. Shared madness isn’t rare, it isn’t aberrant, and it sits a lot closer to ordinary love than we’d like to think. Strip away the spectacle and what’s left is the most common thing in the world: two lonely people who found a home in each other. Show note...

Meditation is the one practice everyone agrees on. It’s on the NHS, in schools, in every influencer’s guide to life, and the pitch is always the same: good for you, good for everyone, can’t hurt. Two of those three are false. It can hurt, it isn’t for everyone—and once you see what it actually is underneath the cushion, you realise you’re probably already doing it. Further reading Meditating for f...

The modern Western story is that real knowledge comes from science or careful reasoning, and anything else—the elder, the guru, the village wise woman—is suspect. But science and reflection themselves rest on a third, intuitive, embodied mode of knowing that we use constantly and pretend we don’t. The doctor and the guru are running on the same authority structure; the only difference is who’s all...

Science feels like the most reliable thing we have. The opposite of belief. But it’s a belief system itself—a ritual, with all the failure modes that rituals have. And the receipts are right there in the replication crisis. Further reading The Scientific Ritual — the article this lecture is based on Problems with p-values — the technical companion: Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, the hybrid mess The trap...

Everyone’s worried about social media and mental health. Jonathan Haidt sold two million copies telling us smartphones rewired our children’s brains. Thirty-five US states passed phone restriction legislation off the back of it. But when you look at the research—really look—the evidence for social media causing mental health problems is shockingly thin. What isn’t thin is the evidence that life, s...

Amygdala hijack, polyvagal theory, the lizard brain, vagus nerve hacks, brain wave states—these look like different theories explaining different things about human behaviour. They’re not. They’re all the same theory: a wildly overengineered version of “just cool the fuck out, and you’ll be better at stuff.” Why do we keep building these things? And what do we miss when we do? Further reading The...

Everyone’s been told that bias is the enemy of good thinking. Over 200 cognitive biases catalogued on Wikipedia, and the message is clear: your brain is broken, and if you could just think more rationally, you’d make better decisions. But when researchers actually tested whether knowledge of biases helped predict behaviour, the experts did worse than random laypeople. Maybe the problem isn’t bias....

Everyone’s been told the amygdala is the fear centre of the brain. That it hijacks your rational mind and throws you into fight-or-flight at the sound of an email notification. This is nonsense—the kind of nonsense that makes every McKinsey consultant sound like a neuroscientist and every neuroscientist cringe. The amygdala is an emotional intensity detector, not an emotional dictator. And focusin...

Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic despotism was savaged by his peers and rightly so. But the pattern he was reaching for—that whoever controls the essential flowing resource controls the people—is the story of modern infrastructure. Energy, social media, payment systems, AI compute. We handed over the water. We don’t have to hand over everything else. Further reading: - The Betterment article t...

Seed oils, raw milk, carnivore diets, tradwives, phone bans, anti-sunscreen, cold plunges—these look like separate cultural phenomena across health, diet, gender, and technology. They’re all the same pattern: the same two faulty assumptions, the same Just So Story template, the same political movement. The yearnings are real. The reasoning isn’t. Further reading: - The Betterment article that insp...

Everyone loves organisational values. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools—any place where people collect in a serious way has a list of qualities they want everyone to embody. But values are just virtue ethics by another name. And virtue ethics suffer two rather troubling problems: virtues are hugely context-dependent, and the situation overwhelmingly drives behaviour anyway. So if you w...

What is consciousness? From Mary’s Room to philosophical zombies, from panpsychism to eliminativism, everyone has theories about the “hard problem.” But under what realistic circumstances would it actually matter whether something is truly conscious versus merely appearing conscious? Further reading Panpsychism AI Consciousness Consciousness vs Conscious Access Mundane Cults The Placebo Effect Spi...

From Libet’s experiments to modern neuroscience, evidence keeps mounting that our decisions might be predetermined. But even if free will is an illusion, what would actually change? Behaviour is still something we can modify, determinism doesn’t excuse us from consequence, and the debate itself is practically irrelevant. Further reading On Motivation: Thinky vs Non-Thinky Dual-Process Theories Bra...

The nature versus nurture debate seems foundational to understanding human behaviour. But evolutionary stories are just stories, genetics is shaped by environment, and the environment matters far more anyway. So why are we still arguing about it? Further reading Genetics is Nurture Evolution is Overrated Atavism Isn’t the Answer Stress is Good Prehistoric Polygamy Sexual Strategies and Evolution T...

The word cult conjures images of hooded figures, mass suicide, and narcissistic leaders. But this dark image is nonsense—the kind that makes us more vulnerable to destructive groups. Cults are actually a pervasive building block of modern community, from veganism to fitness franchises to health movements. The question isn’t whether you’re in one, but whether it’s one you chose. Further reading Suc...

Gender essentialism is having a moment. Everyone’s reading books about what it means to be a man or woman, and Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus keeps getting recommended to me like it’s gospel. Here’s the thing: the book perfectly illustrates a pattern we see everywhere. The same behaviours—complaining, offering advice, needing reassurance, getting defensive—are cast as reasonable when men...

Everyone’s convinced stress is this outdated evolutionary technology—poorly calibrated to modern life, something to avoid at all costs. The story goes that it evolved to help us run from tigers, but now it’s just triggered by email notifications. This is nonsense. Stress is the only thing that gets us to perform at all. It’s the most valuable biological technology we have. This lecture walks throu...