This week, Merlin asks whether John is inoculated against stress.

John has concerns about why his fans are spinning up, and Merlin interrogates his recent obsession with the previous vice president.

Once the usual arguments about wording and meaning have been (mostly) settled, numerous angles are explored. Including an exploration of one of life's thorniest differences to reconcile: how much can I be "how I am" with other people?

In our (85-minute!) members-only bonus show, John has updates on his "home improvement" projects. [This is a good one]

Remember, you can sign up today to hear all the member episodes, get more bonus stuff, and, yes, support our program.

(Recorded on Tuesday, September 20, 2022)

Theory of Mind is the branch of cognitive science that investigates how we ascribe mental states to other persons and how we use the states to explain and predict the actions of those other persons.

Revising a book (or any piece of writing) is about exerting control and imposing order over the first messy draft. But it’s also about running up against the brick walls of your talent and realizing just how much of the success of the book you absolutely cannot control. So it’s not a huge surprise that in between revising bursts, I’ve been organizing the shit out of my house. 

Handle tough food scraps like fruit pits.

Exposure and response prevention (also known as exposure and ritual prevention; ERP or EX/RP) is a variant of exposure therapy that is recommended by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and the Mayo Clinic as first-line treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) citing that it has the richest empirical support for both youth and adolescent outcomes.

When Sperry removed the eye patch and the cats could see with both eyes, he performed the same experiment.

Does a split-brain harbor a split consciousness or is consciousness unified?

Wright's main point is that evolution hardwires us with intense emotions that are in fact delusions.

He interweaves secular Buddhism and evolutionary psychology with precision and clarity, and in doing so he has followed perhaps the best route for modern philosophy: to glean insights from contemporary science in order to examine the human condition and reflect upon our moral imperatives.