Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
Episodes
Ep152 "How do you survive your own thoughts?" with Jewel
04 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What do you do when your own mind stops feeling safe? How does a person sing on stage while panicking inside? How do you catch your thoughts before th...
Ep151 "Can One Be a Rational Optimist About the World?" with Matt Ridley
27 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we generally feel like the world is getting worse, when by almost all measures it’s getting better? How do ideas "have sex”, and wh...
Ep150 "Can We Engineer Dreams?" with Adam Haar Horowitz
20 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Can you influence what you dream about tonight? Are you spending years of your life in a world you don’t recall? Can nightmares be manipulated a...
Ep149 "What makes a brain grow up resilient?" with David Sussillo
13 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can a brain grow up in chaos but find its way to order? There are many ways to have a bad childhood, but why do some children break while others b...
Ep148 "How can we improve political dialog?" with Saul Perlmutter
06 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can we improve political dialogue, and what does this have to do with the discovery that the universe behaves differently than expected? Why do we...
Ep147 "Can we engineer human thought?" with Tom Griffiths
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Can the mind be captured with math? Modern AI seems to have burst out of the gate recently, but is it actually the latest chapter in a 300-year projec...
Ep146 "Who Counts as Human in Your Mind?" with Lasana Harris
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When do you view another person like an object? This is what neuroscientists mean when they talk about de-humanization: your brain doesn't crank ...
Ep145 Why do we compulsively click on ragebait? with Angele Christin
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Do algorithms shape our lives? What did clickbait look like before the internet? Why do journalists start writing differently when metrics are in...
Ep144 "How do things last?" Part 2: Millennia with Alexander Rose
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What is a 10,000 year clock? What is the Y10k bug? What allows some organizations to last a millennium? What do ancient ceramics have to do with ball ...
Ep143 "How do things last?" Part 1: neurons to civilizations
02 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What makes things last, and what do very different lasting things have in common? Why might a space alien not be able to understand music? Why do wind...
Ep142 "Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers?" with Eric Weinstein
23 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowbo...
Ep141 "What do brains and weather systems have in common?" with Nicole Rust
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Does brain science need a new grand plan? Is the brain less like an assembly line and more like a weather system? What does this mean for what co...
Ep140 "How does your brain decide what’s true?" with Sam Harris
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we believe what we believe? Why is changing our opinions so difficult, and why does a challenged belief so often feel like a personal attack? W...
Ep139 "What does alignment look like in a society of AIs?" with Danielle Perszyk
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Is intelligence a property of individual brains, or is it something that emerges from many brains trying to align with one another? How can we build A...
Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion for truth?" with Kaizen Asiedu
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What if your confidence in your political beliefs does not correlate with their accuracy? Why does a pundit's outrage often feel so convincing and nua...
Ep137 "Do cures ever create the next crisis?" with Thomas Goetz
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Medications are among the most important advancements of science, but their social consequences are often complex. What if some of our most common dis...
Ep136 "Why do we care about mattering?" with Rebecca Goldstein
12 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean for your life to matter? We all talk a lot about happiness, pleasure, and meaning... but what if the real engine underneath it all i...
Ep135: What does neuroscience mean by hypnosis? with David Spiegel
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What exactly is hypnosis? We’ve all heard of circus-like versions, but is there a real element to hypnosis that psychiatrists and neuroscientist...
Ep82 Re Broadcast "Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?" Part 1
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Happy Holidays- New Episodes starting Jan. 5th Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though...
Ep70 Re Broadcast "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts"
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Happy Holidays- New episodes starting Jan. 5th Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American ...
Ep134 "What do brains teach us about morality?" with Joshua Greene
15 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why will you make different moral decisions in similar circumstances? Why do some people make different choices than you? What happens when ancie...
Ep133 "Why do people hold misbeliefs?" with Dan Ariely
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do people sometimes buy into ideas that seem obviously false from the outside, as with conspiracy theories? Is this kind of misbelief a universal&...
Ep132 "What will AI mean for the economy?" with Andrew Mayne
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If AI can do everything from writing novels to designing proteins, what remains that only humans can do? What's the human advantage in a world where m...
Ep131 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 2: Rehumanization
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do societies work their way out of polarization? And what does the answer have to do with broken trucks, the Apollo program, the movie 'Watchmen',...
Ep130 "What do brains tell us about politics?" Part 1: Polarization
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What do propaganda posters have in common across nation and time, and how is that related to the medial prefrontal cortex? What is behind repeating cy...
Ep129 "Is utopia possible or do human brains preclude it?" with Paul Bloom
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Would a utopia be possible? Or does our innate tribalism and jealousy make perfect societies difficult to achieve? Do we secretly love hierarchies? Wh...
Ep128 "Would space aliens see the world as we do?" with Daniel Whiteson
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine we eventually meet some alien scientists. If they can see electrons or smell photons, would their science look like ours? Is physics a univers...
EP127 "What happens when we marry brains to machines?" with Sergey Stavisky
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is a brain-computer interface? How can a paralyzed person use her brain to control a robotic arm? How can someone who's lost the gift of speech u...
Ep126 "Does science fiction shape reality?" with Bethanie Maples
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How is sci-fi like a cultural research and development lab? Will we someday have AI agents that live in robot bodies, and will we be liable if they co...
Ep125 "Why do brains need friends?" (with Ben Rein)
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do human brains need social interaction? Why might AI chatbots be insufficient to scratch the itch? What do we love so much about real human touch...
Ep124 "Why don't we notice gaps in time?"
06 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How is your consciousness like a flame that continually goes out and gets re-lit? Why can you see other people's eyes move, but you can't see your own...
Ep123 "Will AI cure loneliness?" with Paul Bloom
29 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On the one hand, AI companions are (increasingly) amazing at rectifying isolation. But on the other hand, loneliness is a biological signal that pushe...
Ep122 "Why do we so rarely say what we mean?" (with Steven Pinker)
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do people on a date speak in innuendo? Why do dictators squelch protests? Why do humans stand apart from the rest of the animal kingdom by blushin...
Ep121 "What’s the secret to intelligence (in brains and AI)?" with Ramesh Raskar
15 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is AI going to go the same way as computing: from colossal LLMs owned by a few companies to billions of networked AI agents? How does that parall...
Ep120 "Will AI build us into better humans?"
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Will AI end up building us into stronger, more talented humans? What might this have to do with linguistics, the movie Arrival, self-driving cars, deb...
Ep119 "Why do brains believe in the unbelievable?" with Bruce Hood
01 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why are brains superstitious? Would you wear a nice sweater that belonged to a murderer? What does this have to do with lucky socks, ghosts, our inter...
Ep118 "Why has the brain always been our hardest puzzle?" with Matthew Cobb
25 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How have humans through the ages tried to crack the mysteries of the brain, and why are our theories always yoked to the most recent technologies...
Ep117 "What does brain science have to do with free speech? (with Greg Lukianoff)" (with Greg Lukianoff)
18 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most people claim to be in favor of free speech, but they often mean speech from their own side (and not whatever those crazy people on the ...
Ep116 " What is Color? Part 2: Why royals wear purple"
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Are there new colors you could see? And why are they impossible to imagine before you've seen them? Can you lose your color vision? And what does...
Ep115 "What is color? Part 1: Why hunters wear orange"
04 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do birds and bees choose different flowers? Why do mammals' eyes seem to be optimized for moving around at night, and what does that have to ...
Ep114 "Would you eat a self burger?"
28 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Would you eat a burger grown from a human muscle cell? Would you rather use your own cell or someone else's? What does the future of lab-grown meat il...
Ep113 "What's special about inventors?" (with Pablos Holman)
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do some people jump into entirely new categories of possibility? And what does this have to do with self-driving ships, solar panels in space, sho...
Ep112 "How is computer code like magic?" (with Sam Arbesman)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is code, and can it be thought of like a magic spell? Are we building a world so complex that we will lose the ability to understand its operatio...
Ep111 "Might we be surrounded with undetected minds?" (with Michael Levin)
07 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What is intelligence? If we look hard, can we find it in unexpected places: not just in brains but in all kinds of structures? How should we recognize...
Ep110 "Is consciousness related to quantum physics?" (with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff)
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Can we explain consciousness as emerging from classical neuroscience, or do we require deeper principles? Could quantum physics have something to do w...
Ep85 rebroadcast - "What is a Thought?"
23 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Brains bear thoughts like a peach tree bears peaches. Even for meditators it's almost impossible to stop the firehose of words and images and ide...
Ep109 "Are you one mind or many drives?" with Jordan Peterson
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is your brain a one-person show or an ensemble cast of rivaling neural networks? How do we manage the conflict between different drives, and what does...
Ep108 "Can brains increase their happiness?" (with Bruce Hood)
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is it possible to become happier? How much of your happiness has to do with genetics, social connection, comparison to other people, your balance...
Ep107 "Why do brains love stories?" (with Joshua Landy)
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do brains slip so easily from the real world into made up worlds? What do authors of great literature have in common with stage magicians and come...
Ep106 "What happens when brains watch movies?" (with Jeffrey Zacks)
26 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do movies work so well? What does film reveal about the way the brain processes reality? What does any of this have to do with omniscience, s...
Ep105 "What if AI is not actually intelligent?" (with Alison Gopnik)
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is AI an intelligent agent, or is there a different way we should be thinking about it? Is it more like a piece of cultural technology? What in the wo...
Ep104 "What is your internal world really like?" (with Russell Hurlburt)
12 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you had to give a detailed description of what flits through your mind, how good would you be at it? Might you be surprised at how many of your tho...
Ep103 "Could you ever know what it’s like to be someone else?" (Part 2)
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What would it take to get inside someone else's head, and could new brain technologies ever help us get there? Will there be dream celebrities, i...
Ep102 "Could you ever know what it’s like to be someone else?" (Part 1)
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does it mean to stand in another’s shoes—and when are the gaps between us too wide to cross? This week, Eagleman explores bats, kicke...
Ep101 "Why do people walk away from bad events with different outcomes?"
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What enables some people to keep going when everything falls apart? We all know someone who’s been through hell and comes out standing. This epi...
Ep100 "Why do brains love slow motion video?"
14 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What does The Matrix tell us about the brain and time perception? And what does that have to do with champion bicyclists, hidden data, elementary...
Ep99 "Why do brains sometimes make things up?"
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Your brain occasionally cooks up falsehoods that you believe entirely, but why does this confabulation happen, and how frequently? What does...
EP98 "What's the future of AI relationships?" (with Bethanie Maples)
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How many people are having relationships with artificial neural networks? Should we think of AI lovers as traps, mirrors, or sandboxes? Is there a cle...
Ep 97 "Can we rewrite the human code?" (with Trevor Martin)
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
You're defined in part by the genome you arrive with -- so what does it mean when you can edit it? What does this have to do with viruses, copy-pastin...
Ep96 "What’s the future of education in an AI world?" (Part 2: Sal Khan)
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Now that we’re careening into our AI future, what are the most important things for our students to learn? Do we keep teaching as we always have...
Ep95 "What's the future of education in an AI world?" (Part 1)
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can we rethink schools to meet the future? What does this have to do with the invention of the printing press, the prevalence of desk calculators,...
Ep94 "How does the brain construct reality?"
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Do you perceive red the same way I do? What is wrong with the textbook model of vision? Why do brains have so many internal feedback loops? And what d...
David Eagleman on Joy A Podcast. Hosted by Craig Ferguson
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Meet David Eagleman - neuroscientist, author, and more. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, syne...
Ep93 "Will AI kill our creativity or enhance it?"
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How will creative people make a living in a world with AI? Is there a different way to think about the economy of the future -- and how might it invol...
Ep92 "Why is it hard to keep a secret?"
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How are secrets in the brain like Abraham Lincoln’s political cabinet? Will AI in the near future hide things from you? And what does any o...
Ep91 "What is love?"
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What are we talking about neurobiologically when we talk about love? What does it have to do with how you were raised, the symmetry of someone's face,...
Ep90 "What's the future of connecting our tech to our brains?"
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A brain's 86 billion neurons are always chattering along with tiny electrical and chemical signals. But how can we get inside the brain to study ...
Ep89 "Why do you love some flavors and not others?"
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why do you like the taste of things that your friend doesn't? Why do kids not like coffee but adults do? What does any of this have to do with smellin...
Ep88 "Might there exist very different kinds of minds?"
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is it so difficult to define intelligence? What does this have to do with being a fish in water trying to describe water? Might we humans possess ...
Ep 87 "How do we operate in the present when we perceive the past?"
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Because visual signals take time to process, we live slightly in the past. So how do we ever catch a baseball? And what does this have to do with cert...
Ep86 "What are emotions?"
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Are emotions something that happen to you, or are they bodily signals we interpret? Does everyone show emotions in the same way -- that is, are there ...
Ep39 rebroadcast "What is the future of AI relationships?"
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why are our brains so wired for love? Could you fall head over heels for a bot? Might your romantic partner be more satisfied with a 5% better version...
Ep10 rebroadcast "Why is it so hard to spot a counterfeit bill?"
23 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What do charlatans have to understand about human perception? Why are you so bad at recognizing a real penny among fakes? What did Eagleman have to do...
Ep85 "What is a Thought?"
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brains bear thoughts like a peach tree bears peaches. Even for meditators it's almost impossible to stop the firehose of words and images and ide...
Ep84 "Why do brains love music?"
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How can we understand music's effect on human brains? Is music universal or does it rely on your experiences? How is music similar to a language? Can...
Ep83 "Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?" Part 2
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Does our sense of self emerge from our brain's skill at lumping things into unchanging categories? What can we learn watching a caterpillar brain tra...
Ep82 "Why Do Your 30 Trillion Cells Feel Like a Self?" Part 1
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though you're the same person you were a month ago? What ...
Ep 81 "How close are we to longevity?"
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Two certainties are death and taxes; a third is that people will work hard to avoid them both. But why is it so difficult to extend our lifespan? We k...
Ep51 rebroadcast "Why do brains dream?"
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do brains dream, and why are dreams so bizarre? Why doesn't your clock work in your dreams? And even though you spend much of your working day loo...
Ep48 rebroadcast "Why do brains become depressed?"
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what...
Ep31 rebroadcast "Why do we see #TheDress differently?"
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why can you hear some sounds two different ways, depending on which word you’re looking at? Why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face? Ho...
Ep1 rebroadcast "Does time really slow down when you're in fear for your life?"
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When he was a child, Eagleman fell off a roof and time seemed to run in slow motion. When he became a neuroscientist, he grew curious about the experi...
Ep80 "What's it like to never forget?"
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What would it be like to have a vastly better memory than you do now? What if you could remember what you were wearing on any day a dozen years ago...
Ep79 "Does everyone have different mind's eyes, mind's ears, and mind's tongues?"
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When you imagine something -- like the sun peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm -- do you see it with rich visual detail, or inst...
Ep78 "Does your brain have one model of the world or thousands?"
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do you see a unified image when you open your eyes, even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a small part of the world? Wha...
Ep77 "What is Life?"
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How do you define what things are living and dead? You might look at a sprinting cheetah and say it's clearly alive, whereas a chunk of rock is not --...
Ep76 "How do you decide?" (Part 2)
16 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Do brains time travel? What is a prediction error? What does any of this have to do with the 2008 crash of the economy, how we keep internal price tag...
Ep75 "How do you decide?" (Part 1)
09 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When you make a decision about what food to order, what's happening in your brain? How do you clinch long-term decisions, like hitting the gym instead...
Ep74 "Why do we laugh?"
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the brain’s point of view, what is humor? When something is funny, why do we breathe in and out rapidly? Do other animals laugh? Why do most jo...
Ep73 "How do we fool ourselves in the stock market?"
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does neuroscience have to do with investment, and what does that have to do with Isaac Newton, the Dutch East India company, Kodak, the way zebr...
Ep72 "How do you put yourself in other people's shoes (and can AI do it)?"
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You know that moment in the horror movie where the monster is coming closer, but the movie star doesn't see it? Why does that drive you crazy, and wha...
Ep71 "Why do our memories drift? Part 2: Misremembering yourself"
12 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is your notion of yourself built on narrative that may or may not be accurate? If someone told you an entirely false story about yourself, could you c...
Ep70 "Why do our memories drift? Part 1: The War of the Ghosts"
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American folklore, eyewitness memory of a car accident, ...
Ep69 "Why do you see something everywhere after you've seen it once?"
29 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does the Baader-Meinhof Group, a West German terrorist group from the 1970s, have to do with the front of your brain, attention, salience, and...
Ep68 "What if our brains worked a trillion times faster?"
22 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why are the majority of stock trades decided by algorithms at timescales we can scarcely conceive of? What is it like to have the speed and power of a...
Ep67 "How did human brains get runaway intelligence? "
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We're the single species who composes symphonies, erects skyscrapers, builds computers, and regularly gets off the planet. But how did human intellige...
Ep66 "Why do brains love conspiracy theories?"
08 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why are conspiracy theories a natural output of the brain? What do they have to do with puzzle-solving, cognitive dissonance, ingroups/outgroups, and...
Ep65 "Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks?"
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Did magicians discover tricks of the mind centuries before neuroscientists? Why can’t you see what they’re doing right in front of you? How do ma...
Ep64 "Why do familiar things lose their shine (& what can we do about it)? "
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you could get a kiss from your favorite celebrity, how long would you want to wait before receiving it? And why do things seem less meaningful or j...
Ep63 "Why do brains love faces?"
17 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we have so much circuitry in the brain devoted to faces? Why does your electrical plug seem to look like a little face? Did aliens plant a sign...