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 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. 7, 2012. Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence (rebroadcast).
I was on hiatus last week, so I replayed this interview from last year: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker discussing his latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues that, modern mayhem notwithstanding, human violence has been trending downward for centuries. We discussed whether, how and why people have been getting more peacable.
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 October 2, 2011. The Life Unconscious: Psychologist Brian Nosek
Just how well do we know our own minds? For the last 15 years, Brian Nosek has been studying the hidden biases, preferences and thought patterns that lurk just below the threshold of self-awareness. Those unconscious attitudes are often at odds with our conscious account of ourselves, yet they may influence our outlook, our choices and even our actions. One of the tools Nosek and colleagues have used to expose latent racial preferences and other forms of bias is a simple online test, the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. In this edition of the show, I take the test myself and talk to Brian about implications of his research for our understanding of the mind, decisionmaking, politics and society.
Visit Project Implicit and take the IAT yourself.
This diagram is nonsense, but I needed something to put here.
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…”)
Show for Aug 7, 2011. How Pleasure Works.
In this re-run from June 2010, psychologist Paul Bloom describes the meaning of pleasure and the pleasure of meaning. More here.
Show for May 1, 2011. Happy Trails: Filmmaker Roko Belic
Thirty years ago, human happiness seemed like a pretty unserious subject for scientific study. These days positive psychology, as happiness research is known, is de rigeur. Filmmaker Roko Belic (Genghis Blues) explores the science of contentment in his latest doc, Happy. Belic traveled to five continents, talking to researchers, comparing the state of satisfaction in various countries and finding some very jolly people. Does happiness depend on our material conditions? Just how much control do we have over our own sense of well-being? And whence the intellectual prejudice—which I confess I shared before this interview—that happiness as a topic lacks gravitas?
Catch a sneak preview of Happy at the Santa Cruz Film Festival on Friday, May 6 and Saturday, May 7. Showtimes and more info here.
Visit the Santa Cruz Film Festival website.
Roko Belic in southern Africa, one of many locations he visited for the new film Happy.
Click the “play” arrow above to listen to the interview, or download the MP3 here.
Show for Oct. 24, 2010: Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin on Musicality and Evolution
The best-selling author of This is Your Brain on Music returns to our show. Neuroscientist, musician and record producer Dan Levitin discusses his most recent book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Levitin contends that music played a key role in human evolution. (Interview originally boradcast in 2008.)
Click the “play” arrow above to listen, or download the MP3 here.
Show for Oct. 10, 2010. Laura Kipnis: Scandals and Why We Love Them
What fuels society’s endless appetite for scandals? And what do public humiliations, meltdowns and flameouts reveal about their participants and the rest of us? The ever-trenchant social critic Laura Kipnis discusses her latest book, How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior. Those adventures include a lovelorn astronaut, an unhinged judge, a conniving confidant and a confabulating memoirist. What’s not to love?
Click the “play” arrow above to listen, or download the MP3 here.
Show for Sept. 26, 2010. Felix Warneken and Robert Sapolsky on the Nicer Side of Primates
Science has done a lot to expose the darker side of human behavior, and that of our primate relatives, so we thought it was time to highlight some more encouraging studies. In part one of the show, developmental psychologist Felix Warneken looks for and finds evidence of instinctive altruism in young humans and chimps. In part two, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky discovers that even baboons—long believed to be incorrigibly bellicose—can change their ways and make nice.
Felix Warneken Robert Sapolsky and colleague
To hear the whole show, click the play arrow above, or download the MP3 here.
Check out Robert Sapolsky’s wonderful book, A Primate’s Memoir, about his years studying baboons in Kenya. The book covers the period leading up to the discoveries Robert described on our show.
Children and Chimps: Good for Goodness Sake?
On our Sept 26, 2010 show, we talked to developmental psychologist Felix Warneken about his search for the roots of altruism in humans and apes. He’s conducted experiments showing naturally helpful behavior in both young children and chimpanzees. Time after time, toddlers and chimps go out of their way to help others with no apparent expectation of reward. Skeptical? Check out the videos.
Show for June 27, 2010. On Being Wrong: Kathryn Schulz on “Wrongology”
Writer Kathryn Schulz considers what it means to be wrong, how we feel about it and how we deal with it. In her new book “On Being Wrong,” Schulz examines the sources of human error, and says that rather than try to perfect ourselves, we need to embrace our fallibility.
Click the arrow above to listen. If you don’t have Flash player or have other playback problems, click this link for the MP3.
Show for June 13, 2010. Psychologist Paul Bloom: How Pleasure Works
Developmental psychologist Paul Bloom investigates the nature of human pleasures, from sex and food to art, music and fantasies. He says that what we like depends on what we think, and there may be no such thing as purely physical pleasure. He discusses his new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.
Click the arrow above to listen. If you don’t have Flash player or have other playback problems, click this link for the MP3.
