Marc Berman

speaker

637 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Marc Berman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

And I think, again, there's this nexus where it's like,

the brain likes predictability, but maybe not perfect.

There's something interesting when it's something deviates a little bit, not too much, you know, because it's satisfying when the prediction is right, but having a little bit of jitter around that prediction can be good.

And it seems like maybe, you know, I'm speculating here, but it seems like a lot of natural stimulation might kind of have that where it's,

You know, you imagine walking in nature and there's like a curve in the path.

You don't know exactly what's behind that curve.

And there's something interesting about that that captures attention, we think, in this kind of softly fascinating way.

Absolutely.

Tom just wrote that book, The Laws of Thought.

You had another guest on who wrote the book, A Theory for Everyone.

No, we don't have it yet.

And that's why I joke with Luis Betancourt, who's an SFI person, and Andrew, who's an SFI postdoc, one of my former students, that I kind of want, I have this desire, can we make

psychology more like physics, but it's very challenging.

It's very difficult, but it's like a dream of mine to get these kinds of

law-like formulas or even, we don't have concepts like, even defining mental energy is not trivial, very complicated.

So we're lacking those kinds of principles that a field like physics has, and then you can do so much more with, and you can just dream that if in psychology we had that, we could do so much more in psychology and neuroscience, but we're certainly not there yet.

Absolutely.

This is something I'm really, really excited about.

I'll take us on a little detour.

I'm a neuroscientist too.

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