Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

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 take the lessons learned from biology and apply them to understanding politics? And what do models of cooperation tell us about building and living with AI? Join Eagleman&nbsp...

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 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 acro...

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 which part of you takes control? Can understanding an emotion loosen its grip? Today we sit down with evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban to understand the logic behind the our...

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 baseline matter more than a population average? Could AI decode the massive signaling networks of your body? Does seeing your own data change your behavior? Join Eagleman with&...

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 of your internal radio? Does a biological understanding of behavior reduce responsibility, or does it deepen compassion? And how would your life change if your loudest urge went quiet...

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? Will radiation accelerate human evolution on Mars? Could living on Mars eventually create a new species of human? Could Mars change the way humans dream? Would a Martian child find...

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 workspace' -- what would it mean if we discovered that AI has something similar? Can you reach inside an LLM to change one of its 'thoughts'? Join Eagleman with Anthropic interpretabilit...

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 political party & the weaknesses of a human, or will they vote for a system that has a jaw-dropping capacity to extract patterns from vast rivers of data, simulate millions of possible...

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 humans? Could curiosity become the most important survival skill of the twenty-first century? What happens to your biological neural networks when artificial neural networks do your think...

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 something very small, like nanoparticles? Would this allow us to spy on millions (or billions) of neurons talking at once -- and could we do so without opening the...

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 from? Might depression, addiction, OCD, and PTSD all share the same problem? Is mental freedom just the ability to change states? Join Eagleman with neuroscientist...

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 uncertainty be more common than prejudice? Why do strangers become enemies so easily? Can we engineer more trust into society? Today Eagleman sits down with Stanford social psycholo...

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 machines become smarter than us, what roles are left for humanity? Should we think of AI as software, or as something we’re raising like a child? Will tomorrow’s AI...

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 do with sending one’s own cells into space, or rescuing animals on the very brink of extinction? Today we talk with stem cell biologist Jeanne Loring about the...

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 food from a high chair again and again, are they being mischievous or are they running physics experiments? And what does any of this have to do with whether dopamine is more than a ple...

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 the case, why does the experience of the self feel so solid that it often takes a lifetime to notice something strange? Why would evolution invent the feeling...

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 fragile coalition of neural processes? Join Eagleman today with Masud Husain, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Oxford, to explore fascinating case studies about how change...

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 own minds? And what does any of this have to do with Frankenstein’s creature, why some people wear a stop sign on their T-shirt, or smiling monkeys? Join Eagleman today w...

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 learning to read reconfigure the circuitry of your brain? Does dyslexia reveal how unnatural reading really is? And could AI freeze the evolution of language for the first time in histo...

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 object it’s about to pick up, even if it doesn’t need to? Is movement the original form of animal intelligence? Join Eagleman with guest Catie Cuan, a roboticist, dancer,...

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 the inside and the outside. Why do some people lock the door but go back repeatedly to check it, and still have a feeling of uncertainty that it’s locked? Why do some people was...

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 fails? What if the difference between despair and recovery is electrical? How can we better recognize invisible struggles in those around us? Join Eagleman with guest Jon Nelson, a...

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 same fears? Is anxiety helping you perform better, or does it make everything harder? Is it possible to unlearn worry the same way you learned it? Join Eagleman with Dr. Jud Br...

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 about mental health: the battles she’s lived, the wisdom she’s earned, and the lives she’s helping shape. This episode kicks off Mental Health Awareness month, wh...

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 the future? What if optimism is a more rational stance than pessimism? If innovation isn’t primarily about lone geniuses, what’s it really about? Join Eaglema...