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The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figu ... Show More
Sep 10
Armin W. Schulz, "Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences" (Springer, 2025)
Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments: there are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these ways are. For many social scientists, social institutions are sets of rules about how to act, though theories differ about what th ... Show More
1h 5m
Aug 10
Frances Egan, "Deflating Mental Representation" (MIT Press, 2025)
The human mind has the curious, even mysterious, ability to generate thoughts about things with which we are not in causal contact, such as when we think about yesterday’s tennis final, or Aristotle, or unicorns. Naturalizing mental content has usually meant explaining how this i ... Show More
1h 2m
Dec 2024
#97: Predictive Processing & Ultimate Well-Being - Shamil Chandaria, PhD
In this episode, Dr. Shamil Chandaria, an expert in consciousness, neuroscience, and AI, shares insights from his work on human experience and the intersection of technology and well-being. He discusses the Bayesian brain theory and the free energy principle, explaining how the b ... Show More
1h 18m
Feb 2025
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with neuroscientist, bestselling author, and PBS presenter Dr. David Eagleman. They discuss brain plasticity, how perception works, whether free will exists (and if it’s superordinate), how willingness to engage with higher entropy indicates sophi ... Show More
1h 30m
Mar 2025
Can AI match the human brain? | Surya Ganguli
AI is evolving into a mysterious new form of intelligence — powerful yet flawed, capable of remarkable feats but still far from human-like reasoning and efficiency. To truly understand it and unlock its potential, we need a new science of intelligence that combines neuroscience, ... Show More
16m 57s
Jul 15
#104: Intelligence Beyond the Brain - Nikolay Kukushkin, PhD
Can cells outside the brain learn, remember, and make decisions? In this episode, neuroscientist Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin shares groundbreaking research that shows even non-neuronal cells can recognize patterns, count, and store information in ways strikingly similar to brain cells. ... Show More
1h 12m
Jul 2024
#374 — Consciousness and the Physical World
Sam Harris speaks with Christof Koch about the nature of consciousness. They discuss Christof’s development as a neuroscientist, his collaboration with Francis Crick, change blindness and binocular rivalry, sleep and anesthesia, the limits of physicalism, non-locality, brains as ... Show More
42m 7s
Feb 2025
188. Mind Reading 101: To Know What Your Audience Thinks, Just Ask
How to really know what your audience is thinking.To be a great communicator, you have to get out of your own head. But that’s not all, says Matt Lieberman. According to him, you also have to get into the head of someone else.“Mind-reading is this remarkable ability that humans h ... Show More
24m 48s