Show for March 24, 2013. Neurologist Robert Burton on The Limits of Neuroscience.
I don’t know whether Bob Burton’s car sports this bumper sticker…
… but it ought to. Bob has spent years exploring our shaky reliance on what he calls “involuntary mental sensations”: the internal perceptions by which we come to “know” our own minds. He says these inner representations, offered up by the brain itself, are partial at best, delusory at worst. And that’s a problem not only for ordinary seekers of self-knowledge but also for an ambitious group of neuroscientists attempting to explain consciousness and the human psyche, while beholden to many of the same, suspect intuitions that bamboozle the rest of us. Of course, there’s also that matter of the yawning gulf separating objective explanation and subjective experience, and whether it’s bridgeable at all.
Bob raises these and other problems in his latest book, A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell us About Ourselves. We had a long and wide-ranging tête-à-tête on the difficulties that loom when science shifts from studying the brain to mapping the mind, and the deep and dubious assumptions built into categories such as conscious and unconscious, self and other, choice and non-choice.
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for March 17, 2013. Neurologist Robert Burton on Self-Certainty.
As a preamble to next week’s interview with neurologist and neuroskeptic Robert Burton, I re-aired this earlier conversation with Bob from 2008. In it, we discussed his book On Being Certain: Believing You’re Right Even When You’re Wrong, about our brain’s often unreliable sense of self-certainty. Bob says our inner sensation of knowing or not knowing something, of familiarity or unfamiliarity – so critical to perception, judgment and decisionmaking – is based on neural mechanisms that can go badly awry and, even when things are working OK, is hardly a dependable arbiter of truth.
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Feb 17, 2013. Hear, Hear: Auditory Neuroscientist and Sound Savant Seth Horowitz.
Sound as vibration, sound as sensation, sound as means of manipulation. Sound as a state of mind and as a weapon. Seth Horowitz considers sonic phenomena from these and other angles in his new book The Universal Sense. And he’s a good one to do it: as a neuroscientist specializing in auditory phenomena, sound recordist, musician and aural explorer, not to mention the guy who proved that tadpoles can hear, Seth is a well-travelled guide to the sonic world. He and I listened to a sampling of audio curiosities while contemplating questions such as:
- What’s faster, our ears or our eyes?
- What’s it like to be a bat?
- What’s it like to be Evelyn Glennie?
- How do we build a picture of the world from auditory clues?
- Why are low sounds ominous?
- Can sounds kill?
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Jan 13, 2013. Human Evolution Marches On?
People love to trip out on the subject of future human evolution, usually conjuring some form of twinkly transcendence (a seraphic super-race) or dystopian degeneracy (machine-dependent dullards enfeebled by our own technology). But those stories owe more to wishful thinking or baseless anxiety than to actual evolutionary theory. I decided to forgo the fantasizing and explore the science itself: the forces that shaped our species and that are still at work, however subtly, today. Evolutionary biologist Barry Sinervo joined me to explain the fundamentals and offer some educated guesses on what comes next.
Barry has been on the 7th Avenue Project twice before, discussing lizard evolution and game theory here and a major new study of climate-related extinctions here.
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Nov 25, 2012. Your Brain on Music (Rerun).
An old fave makes its return: our 2007 jam with music producer/neuroscientist Dan Levitin.
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Oct. 28, 2012. From Animals to Us: David Quammen on Zoonotic Disease.
There’s more between humans and our fellow animals than a common ancestry and a common planet. We also share some really gnarly pathogens. Our “infernal, aboriginal connectedness,” as David Quammen puts it, makes humanity a target-rich environment for zoonoses – diseases that spring up in other species and leap to us. In fact, most of our infectious maladies may have gotten their start in animals, and the latest wave of emergent contagions, including HIV, Ebola, SARS, Hantavirus, Lyme disease, avian flu and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow) all have non-human beginnings.
David has spent the last few years absorbing the latest research, hanging with scientists and Indiana Jonesing his way through jungles and caves (with respirator and hazmat suit in place of fedora and bomber jacket), in pursuit of zoonotic wisdom. His new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, is simultaneously a serious introduction to the biology and epidemiology of animal-to-human disease, a series of medical adventure stories and a somber warning (he says human actions are responsible for the uptick in spillovers).
Despite the scary cover, David Quammen’s book eschews
the sensational and sticks to the science.
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for March 4, 2012. Sebastian Seung—Mapping the Brain
And you thought sequencing the human genome was a big job. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is proposing something even more Herculean: tracing the trillions of neuronal connections in the human brain, collectively known as the “connectome.” He believes the connectome may hold the key to understanding the brain and the self. That follows from connectionism—the notion that learning, memory and personality are embedded in the brain’s wiring. Like so much else in neuroscience, that’s still hypothetical, and Sebastian is refreshingly candid about the limits of current understanding. We discussed what is and isn’t known about the workings of neurons, how the brain’s circuitry might encode information, the relevance of computer models, and artificial intelligence techniques that may help map the connectome. Also: the “Jennifer Aniston neuron,” whether or not to freeze your posthumous head, and the cautionary tale of the South Park underpants gnomes.
Click the Play arrow above to listen to the show, or you can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Jan 29, 2012: Pulling the Wool Over Our Own Eyes—Robert Trivers on the Evolution of Self-Deception
Robert Trivers is a widely influential evolutionary thinker (as these tributes from Steven Pinker et. al. attest). His theoretical work on the genetic trade-offs underlying altruism, parent-child relationships and other social interactions are a cornerstone of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology. His new book, The Folly of Fools, applies an evolutionary framework to another set of behaviors: deception and especially self-deception. Subjects discussed in our interview include: self-deception in nature, our capacity to simultaneously know and blind ourselves to the truth, the field formerly known as sociobiology, and Robert’s own life and career, including his friendship with the late Black Panther leader Huey Newton.
Click the Play arrow above to listen to the show, or you can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Oct. 30, 2011. Cognitive Psychologist Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence
Steven Pinker, celebrated for his books on language and the workings of the mind, ventures into big history with his latest volume, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He presents a truckload of evidence to argue that humans have been getting more peaceful, more cooperative and less murderous, on scales large and small, for quite some time. Among the reasons: civilization really has made us more civil. That might seem a surprising conclusion for a card-carrying evolutionary psychologist, but Pinker hasn’t gone all liberal artsy on us. Historicity has a role to play, he says, but so do biology and game theory.
You can download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Show for Oct. 9, 2011. Evolutionary Biologist Marlene Zuk on Bugs and Us
We love biologists who can entertain as well as they explain, and Marlene Zuk is great at both. Last time we had her on the show, the subject was parasites (you can listen or download the mp3 here). This time, it’s insects, and what they do or don’t have in common with human beings. Our conversation took some fun and interesting turns into areas such as anthropomorphism and sexual politics in entomology.
Click the “play” arrow above to listen to the show, or download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Marlene Zuk’s latest book, Sex on Six Legs.
Show for July 17, 2011. The Machinery of Life.
Harry Noller has been doing molecular biology since before it was even called that, and he’s been doing it very well. His work has helped illumine some of the fundamental processes on which all life (at least all earthly life) depends. He speaks about his fascinating career and research on today’s show. We’ll hear about his meetings with remarkable scientists, his own brush with Nobel laureate-hood and the dizzying intricacies of his pet research subject, the microscopic machines known as ribosomes.
Click the “play” arrow above to listen to the show, or download the MP3 here (if using a Mac, control-click the link and choose “Save Link As…” If using a PC, right-click and choose Save Target As…”)
Harry’s lab has put together some ribosome animations, which you can view here. Have patience: some of these take a while to download. Here’s another ribosome movie (very simplified), with music you can dance to:
Show for June 12, 2011. Carl Zimmer and Planet of Viruses
The last time we had science writer Carl Zimmer on the show, it was to discuss E Coli, the subject of his book Microcosm. The book is an eye-opener for anyone who would dismiss bacteria as rudimentary bugs. As Carl explained, E Coli have a social life, sex of a sort, seem to learn and may even be said to lie and cheat. Now he’s moved a notch down the biological yardstick, revealing the richness of life on the smallest scales. We talked about his latest book, A Planet of Viruses, and the huge role viruses play in human history, in the evolution of life on earth, the ecology and even the world’s climate.
Click the “play” arrow above to listen to the show, or download the MP3 here.
Show for March 27, 2011: Re-Creating the Creation (from 2009)
How life may have begun on Earth, with a little help from outer space. I talk to biochemist and astrobiologist Dave Deamer about the hypothetical origins of life. Also, attempts to conjure life in the lab, and music from DNA.
Photo: Deamer believes a key step on the way to life may have been the formation of membrane-like fatty bubbles in the warm freshwater ponds of early Earth. Here, he tries to simulate those conditions in the volcanically active Kamchatka region of Russia.
Click the “play” arrow above to listen to the interview, or download the MP3 here.
Show for Dec. 5, 2010: Saving Animals, Cell by Cell
San Diego’s “Frozen Zoo” is one of the world’s largest collections of living animal tissue, gathered from hundreds of species for research, conservation and even cloning. We talked to geneticist Oliver Ryder, one of the scientists who manage the Frozen Zoo. Also, a conversation with David Haussler, coordinator of the Genome 10K Project, which is using samples from the Frozen Zoo and other sources to map the genomes of 10,000 species.
You can download the MP3 here.
