Maria Popova

speaker

931 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Maria Popova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Maria Popova · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

And the short version is basically they do dream.

Not only do they dream, but evolution invented REM, the dream rich REM state in the avian brain.

And when they sleep, so for example, pigeons during REM sleep, areas of their brain associated with wing motor action and spatial navigation light up.

And songbirds, young songbirds who have to learn their repertoire while they sleep, you can map the activity of particular neurons to particular notes in the melody they were learning that day.

So birds dream, they dream of flying, and they dream of singing, and they're practicing in their sleep.

And I thought, how incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible.

And so then, after this immersion in the bird sleep world, birds started coming to my own dreams, which is very unusual because I tend to have hyper-realistic dreams, mostly anxiety dreams about missing trains and things like that.

Deep falling off.

So much fun.

Oh, God.

I haven't had that one yet.

But now that you've planted the seed in my unconscious, I look forward to losing my teeth in my sleep.

Why are teeth so primal?

That's so interesting.

Well, I've never had in my large repertoire of anxiety dreams, the tooth has not appeared or disappeared for that matter.

Right.

But what did appear was a great blue heron carrying the sky on her back and a million sandhill cranes unspooling from the horizon, becoming the Milky Way and a magpie speaking to me in my mother's voice.

And I thought, what does it all mean?

And meanwhile, I was discovering that a number of people in my life that I love and respect intellectually were using tarot cards.

Now, I mentioned I come from the world of science, so I have spent my life dismissing those types of things as anti-scientific, residual medievalism from that world Kepler lived in where Satan was more real than gravity.

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