Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

90:50

Ep154 "Can a Depressed Brain Find Its Way Out?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/05/18

What if your brain got stuck in sadness and never reset? What does it feel like when joy disappears completely? Can a person love their family deeply and still want to die? What do you do when treatment after treatment fails? What if the difference between despair and recovery is electrical? How can we better recognize invisible struggles in those around us? Join Eagleman with guest Jon Nelson, a man who suffered for years under the grip of depression, and finally found a science-fiction like

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58:38

Ep153 Can You Unlearn Anxiety? with Judson Brewer

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/05/11

Week 2 of Mental Health Awareness month: Anxiety is close to everyone’s experience, either because you've had it or someone close to you has. Does your brain accidentally teach itself to stay anxious by looping on the same fears? Is anxiety helping you perform better, or does it make everything harder? Is it possible to unlearn worry the same way you learned it? Join Eagleman with Dr. Jud Brewer, who suffered with anxiety as a young man... and then became a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who

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65:51

Ep152 "How do you survive your own thoughts?" with Jewel

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/05/04

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 they catch you? Join Eagleman with singer/songwriter Jewel to talk about mental health: the battles she’s lived, the wisdom she’s earned, and the lives she’s helping shape. This episode kicks offMental Health Awareness month, when we’re reminded to look directly at what is typically hidden.A troubled mind with stormy weather can

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57:13

Ep151 "Can One Be a Rational Optimist About the...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/04/27

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 why does that matter for innovation? Why do brains tend to systematically misread the future? What if optimism is a more rational stance than pessimism? If innovation isn’t primarily about lone geniuses, what’s it really about? Join Eaglemanwith scientist and author Matt Ridley to explore what it means to be, in Ridley’s phrasing, a

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67:55

Ep150 "Can We Engineer Dreams?" with Adam Haar Horowitz

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/04/20

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 as a therapy? Are dreams sometimes predictive of changes in your health before you become aware of them? Join Eagleman with Adam Haar Horowitz, a neuroscientist and dream engineer who spends his working days trying to help people during their night time.

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51:23

Ep149 "What makes a brain grow up resilient?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/04/13

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 bend and keep going? How much of who you are is written in your genes & how much is sculpted by your environment? How many versions of you were possible & why did this one win out? Join Eagleman today with David Sussillo, who was abandoned as a child but grew up to become a neuroscientist & technologist. We’ll explore what his

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55:25

Ep148 "How can we improve political dialog?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/04/06

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 cling to beliefs even when evidence pushes against them? What if the biggest problem facing humanity could be solved with practice? Join Eagleman today with Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel-prize winning astrophysicist, but instead of the cosmos we talk about the inner cosmos: why polarization happens and how we might address it with a different kind of

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50:22

Ep147 "Can we engineer human thought?" with Tom...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/03/30

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 project to turn thought into something we can model? Why does current AI need petabytes of data, but a child can learn from just a few examples? Why does AI have 'jagged' intelligence – meaning it looks brilliant in one moment and then does something that seems nonsensical? In physics we have various laws (gravity, motion, etc), and today we’re

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67:33

Ep146 "Who Counts as Human in Your Mind?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/03/23

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 up its social circuitry to understand the other person as having a mind like you do.Is dehumanization a cause of violence, or the fuel that keeps it burning? Do people who view themselves as highly empathetic dehumanize more than others? And on the flip side, why do we sometimes think chatbots or robots are people with interior minds? Will kids raised with

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70:28

Ep145 Why do we compulsively click on ragebait? with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/03/16

Do algorithms shape our lives? What didclickbait look like before the internet? Why do journalists start writing differently when metrics are introduced? What does any of this have to do with cooking pasta in the bathtub, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, or Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year? Join Eagleman with sociologist Angele Cristin to learn how algorithms invisibly sculpt our behavior.

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55:50

Ep144 "How do things last?" Part 2: Millennia with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/03/09

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 bearings in satellites? What does any of this have to do with bristlecone pine trees, cymbals, or an extant hotel that launched in the sixth century? Join today for thinking about ourselves on a 10,000 year timescale with guest Alexander Rose.

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44:23

Ep143 "How do things last?" Part 1: neurons to...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/03/02

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 windows in medieval cathedrals look thicker at the bottom, and what does this reveal about the world’s religions? What was the most important weapon in ancient history, and how did it disappear? Join today for the story of persistence, from sharks to schizophrenia to Roman concrete to DNA.

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92:59

Ep142 "Do breakthroughs require rule-breakers?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/02/23

Why do revolutionary ideas so often come from outsiders? Do good scientists sometimes crowd out great ones? Do we still have room for scientific cowboys? And what is the relationship between national security and modern science? Are scientists participants in a larger game they barely see? What if the most important ideas are the ones you’re not allowed to hear about? From Crick and Watson to nuclear bombs and AI, today we’ll cover it all with physicist, mathematician, and iconoclast

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36:42

Ep141 "What do brains and weather systems have in...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/02/16

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 counts as explanatory, and how might AI help us in the near future? What does any of this have to do with how the drug Ritalin got its name? Today we’ll speak with neuroscientist Nicole Rust, author ofElusive Cures.

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80:33

Ep140 "How does your brain decide what’s true?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/02/09

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? What if beliefs didn’t evolve to be true, but to be socially useful? Today we speak with Sam Harris about the topic of our beliefs: how we see the world and what we take to be true about it.

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58:24

Ep139 "What does alignment look like in a society of...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/02/02

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 AI agents to improve our understanding of the world and to mediate between rivaling humans? For this and much more, we speak today with Danielle Perszyk, a cognitive scientist who leads the human-computer interaction team at Amazon’s AGI Lab.

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67:53

Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/01/26

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 nuanceso unsatisfying? Are conspiracy theories a predictable feature of human brains? Is there any way to stop ourselves from mistaking our feelings for conclusions? How can we come to be clearer thinkers? Today we speak with political commentator Kaizen Asiedu about how we arrive at our hot takes on the world.

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47:10

Ep137 "Do cures ever create the next crisis?" with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/01/19

Medications are among the most important advancements of science, but their social consequences are often complex. What if some of our most common diseases are design flaws of modern life? Does it matter if we're fixing a root cause rather than just circumventing it?If a pill can quiet hunger, pain, or anxiety, is that "cheating"? Today we talk about the fascinating world of prescription drugs with science journalist Thomas Goetz.

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41:31

Ep136 "Why do we care about mattering?" with Rebecca...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/01/12

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 is the need to feel we count? Is it possible that depression, extremism, and ambition all stem from the same psychological source? When is political polarization less about beliefs and more about threatened significance? Join Eaglemanwith philosopher and writer Rebecca Goldstein, author of "The Mattering Instinct".

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55:17

Ep135: What does neuroscience mean by hypnosis? with...

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman ·

2026/01/05

What exactly is hypnosis? We’ve all heard of circus-like versions, but is there a real element to hypnosis that psychiatrists and neuroscientists are able to leverage? Can attention and expectation change what we feel (such as pain or anxiety)? What do suggestible states reveal about the brain’s pathways? How does hypnosis compare to meditation, flow states, or psychedelic drugs? Today we speak with David Spiegel, Stanford psychiatrist and one of the world’s experts in

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