5 October 2025
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Oct 18, 2019 —
Robert Wright & John Horgan
- What is scientism, and who is doing it?
- Postmodernism and whether science just tells “stories”
- John criticizes the “ideological fervor” of evolutionary psychology
- The hubris of scientists in the ’80s and ’90s
- Has science reached its fundamental limits in trying to explain consciousness?
- John wins his Nobel Prize “long bet” on string theory
- The various corrupting influences on scientists
- A brief debate on higher purpose
TAGS atheism | cognitive science | Daniel Dennett | evolution | mind-body problem | physics | religion | science
Jul 16, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Jamie Lauren Keiles
- Jamie’s NYT Magazine piece, “How ASMR Became a Sensation”
- Searching for the science behind ASMR
- Why are ASMR creators disproprotionately female?
- The strange life of Gibi, one of the top “ASMRtists”
- A temporary salve for Internet-era loneliness
- Will ASMR go corporate?
- Jamie researches the history of the Jewish American Princess
- Daddy’s money, girl power, and Juicy Couture
- Are there Jewish American Princes?
TAGS cognitive science | evolution | gender | happiness | human nature | Judaism | media | psychology | religion
Jan 15, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Alice Robb
- Alice’s new book, Why We Dream
- All the wrong ways we used to think about dreams
- The unusual discovery of REM sleep
- When scientists thought dreams were a paranormal gateway
- Alice describes participating in a “dream group”
- What do events in dreams really mean?
- Why do we have nightmares?
- How to get started with lucid dreaming
Nov 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Eddy Nahmias
- Explaining “compatibilism,” the view that there’s no conflict between free will and determinism
- Without free will, what happens to moral responsibility?
- Eddy tells Bob he errs in saying determinism means events are “inevitable”
- Free will is hard to imagine, but not nonsensical
- Why most philosophers today are compatibilists
- Bob: Compatibilists are just playing word games
- Were prisoners destined from birth to wind up in prison?
- Waiting for the “Einstein of consciousness”
Nov 14, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Rebecca Lohnes
- Rebecca’s path from the Ivy League to an animal shelter
- The science of animal training
- The many reasons why you shouldn’t try to be your dog’s “alpha”
- What we know about animal personality
- What goes on inside an animal shelter?
- Is there such a thing as a “bad dog”?
- What’s actually happening when your pet looks ashamed
- Aryeh and Rebecca debate whether their dog loves them
Sep 20, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
- John’s new book, Mind-Body Problems, is free online
- “What are we really, what can we be, and what should we be?”
- Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist with an affinity for violence
- Douglas Hofstadter, a playful writer, but a melancholic person
- Why ex-materialist Christof Koch embraced panpsychism
- How losing a daughter made Stuart Kaufman study the paranormal
- Story time! Nikita and John exchange psychedelic tales
TAGS biology | cognitive science | consciousness | enlightenment | evolution | human nature | meditation | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science | spirituality
Jul 13, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Thomas Metzinger
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | democracy | human nature | meditation | philosophy | politics | psychology | science | self
Jun 25, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Stuart Hameroff
- The Hameroff-Penrose theory of quantum consciousness
- Why we’ll never construct a true artificial intelligence
- The implications of quantum consciousness for free will
- Do microtubules in the brain explain consciousness?
- How quantum physics could help us understand anesthesia
- Why Stuart doesn’t dismiss paranormal research
- Could quantum entanglement explain paranormal phenomena?
Apr 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet Show: Are emotions in the brain?
- Luiz Pessoa’s argument for the feedback between lower and higher brain function
- How the regions of the brain evolved to interact
- “The content problem” in the neuroscience of emotion and cognition
- Are the common fears of snakes and spiders “hard-wired,” and how?
- What brain mapping fails to tell us about cognition
- Rami’s research on prosopagnosia (face blindness) and emotional cognition
TAGS cognitive science
Mar 7, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet show: Why are human emotions unique?
- Does self-restraint make us human?
- Considering emotions as social constructs
- Stephen: If you have emotions, you have consciousness
- Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily defer to it its creator
- How insects are like robots
- Does culture change how the brain reads emotion in faces?
TAGS cognitive science
Feb 9, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Jeff Warren
- How Jeff went from science journalist to meditation teacher
- Jeff’s new book, co-authored with Dan Harris: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
- How ADD and bipolar tendencies shaped Jeff’s practice
- The life-changing experience of falling out of a tree while on mushrooms
- The interaction between mindfulness, not-self, and suffering
- Jeff takes a stab at defining enlightenment
- The varieties of consciousness
- How meditation can shift your priorities
Feb 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- This week’s puppet show: How do emotions help us survive?
- Darwin’s attempts to understand the inner lives of animals
- Can we really hide our feelings? Rami doubts it
- The “seeking” drive that keeps us going
- Angst: Fear without an object
- How culture complicates finding a mate
- Is there an adaptive function to recognizing beauty?
Sep 8, 2017 —
Josh Summers & Stephen Asma
TAGS altruism | cognitive science | consciousness | Donald Trump | dreaming | empathy | ethics | evolution | meditation | philosophy
Sep 7, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Alison Gopnik
- How a personal crisis brought Alison back to David Hume
- Hume’s (likely) chance encounter with Buddhism
- Lessons learned from 23-year-old Hume’s nervous breakdown
- Which ideas might Hume have borrowed from Buddhism?
- How meditation disrupts the ‘autopilot’ of adulthood
- Is introspection as valuable as neuroscience?
May 22, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Jay Van Bavel
- The partisanship that bolsters Trump
- Jay’s favorite experiments on the psychology of tribalism
- Is the anti-Trump movement its own worst enemy?
- What’s going on in Trump’s brain?
- How a sports fan’s brain warps reality
- Is there hope for overcoming our tribal psychology?
- Want a retweet? Stoke moral outrage.
TAGS cognitive science | democracy | Donald Trump | moral imagination | psychology | science | tribalism
Mar 20, 2017 —
Robert Wright & S. Matthew Liao
TAGS biology | climate change | cognitive science | drugs | ethics | genetics | love | memory | mental health | science | technology | the future | war
Feb 24, 2017 —
Josh Summers & Ellen Langer
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | empathy | human nature | meditation | mindfulness | perception | psychology | science
Feb 15, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Robert Stickgold
TAGS biology | cognitive science | consciousness | creativity | dreaming | evolution | psychology | science
Feb 6, 2017 —
Daniel Kaufman & Massimo Pigliucci
- Join the hordes clamoring for Massimo’s forthcoming book!
- The science of ethics
- Is morality baked into our biology?
- Can primates tell us where morality comes from?
- How Kant and moral psychology complement each other
- Nietzsche’s moral philosophy
- Warning: Chimps and bonobos are not hairy proto-humans!
- The trouble with studying morality in infants
TAGS cognitive science | ethics | evolution | human nature | justice | philosophy | psychology | science | tribalism
Feb 2, 2017 —
Robert Wright, Deepak Chopra, & Michael Shermer
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | consciousness | enlightenment | Hinduism | human nature | meditation | mysticism | perception | philosophy | physics | psychology | science | self | spirituality
Jan 23, 2017 —
Daniel Kaufman & David Ottlinger
TAGS cognitive science | democracy | free will | gender | human nature | language | philosophy | politics | psychology | violence
Dec 16, 2016 —
Philip Menchaca & Erik Vance
- Erik’s new book Suggestible You
- When snake oil actually works
- How your beliefs can change your body
- Why do people respond differently to the same placebo?
- How the discovery of “placebo genes” could transform medicine
- The fuzzy line between placebos and real medicine
- Erik’s visit to a Mexican witch doctor
Dec 6, 2016 —
Robert Wright & Paul Bloom
TAGS altruism | anger | Buddhism | cognitive science | compassion | empathy | enlightenment | ethics | human nature | meditation | moral imagination | Peter Singer | psychology | science
Nov 22, 2016 —
Oliver Burkeman & Jonathan Shedler
- Debunking the debunking of psychoanalytic theory
- Can thoughts change emotions?
- The patient-therapist relationship as a window into the self
- Therapy’s modest goal
- Psychotherapy’s struggle to escape Freud’s shadow
- Psychoanalyzing the urge to engage in psychoanalysis
- Looking at politics through a psychoanalytic lens
Nov 13, 2016 —
Robert Wright & Keith Frankish
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | consciousness | ethics | evolution | human nature | memory | mind-body problem | panpsychism | perception | philosophy | psychology | self | technology
Nov 12, 2016 —
David Bryce Yaden & Scott Barry Kaufman
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | consciousness | creativity | ethics | meditation | mindfulness | psychology | spirituality
Nov 4, 2016 —
Robert Wright & Christof Koch
- The search for non-human consciousness
- Consciousness in the organic and inorganic worlds
- Measuring consciousness
- Lucky us: The universe breeds consciousness
- How scientific and spiritual worldviews can enrich each other
- Artificial intelligence is not (necessarily) artificial consciousness
- The Allen Institute for Brain Science and its mission
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | consciousness | ethics | evolution | panpsychism | physics | science | spirituality | technology | the future
Oct 26, 2016 —
Robert Wright & David Chalmers
TAGS cognitive science | consciousness | evolution | human nature | mind-body problem | physics | psychology | science
Oct 19, 2016 —
Robert Wright & Sam Harris
- Sam Harris, mystic and atheist
- The mystery of consciousness
- Is mysticism more like science than like religion?
- How religion makes progress
- Sam’s case for intolerance
- The root causes of extremism
- Religious and secular reasons to do good
- Ways religion may be closer to the truth than atheism
- A secular approach to death
TAGS agnosticism | atheism | Buddhism | Christianity | cognitive science | consciousness | death | empathy | ethics | evolution | history | Islam | meditation | mind-body problem | mindfulness | mysticism | nationalism | New Atheists | perception | poverty | psychology | religion | science | self | spirituality | tribalism
Aug 8, 2016 —
Robert Wright & Susan Schneider
TAGS cognitive science | compassion | consciousness | death | free will | human nature | identity | mind-body problem | philosophy | physics | psychology | science | technology | the future | transhumanism
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