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Big Think
By bigthinkEducation
Big Think episodes
- Is your workout routine giving you a brain boost? This neuroscientist thinks it might | Wendy Suzuki
Want to be more intelligent? Here’s why you should hit the gym, according to neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki
Wendy Suzuki studies exercise's transformative effects on the brain.Drawing inspiration from animal studies, particularly those involving the growth of hippocampal brain cells in rats, she explores the possible connection between increased exercise and brain expansion.Suzuki also looks into the multifaceted relationship between exercise, sleep, cardiovascular function, and brain health.-------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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6 min - Anne-Laure Le Cunff: The 3 cognitive scripts that rule over your life | Full Interview
"We try to stick to routines and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process. There is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved."
This episode explores how cognitive overload and the pressure to maximize productivity lead to anxiety, burnout, and rigid goal-setting. Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff introduces the concept of the "maximized brain," where ambition overrides curiosity, often resulting in overwhelm. She contrasts this with the "experimental mindset," which embraces small, curiosity-driven experiments instead of rigid goals. Drawing from her own journey—leaving Google, failing at a startup, and rediscovering her passion for neuroscience—she explains how tiny experiments can lead to personal growth. She also discusses three limiting mindsets (cynical, escapist, and perfectionist) and how shifting to an experimental approach can lead to a more fulfilling, conscious life.
00:00 Taking control of your mindset00:16 The experimental mindset01:22 What is the maximalist brain?02:20 How did you discover the experimental mindset?04:29 Why is mindset so important?05:18 What are the mindsets that hold us back?07:29 What mindset should we strive for?08:39 How do you cultivate an experimental mindset?12:04 How do you analyze the collected data?13:43 How have you personally employed the experimental mindset?15:20 What are some tiny experiments anyone can do?16:33 Why should we commit to curiosity?17:29 The illusion of certainty19:13 How are uncertainty and anxiety linked?20:07 Why did our brains evolve to fear uncertainty?21:10 How should we approach uncertainty instead?22:20 What is the linear model of success?23:50 How can we go from linear success to fluid experimentation?24:36 How can labeling emotions help manage uncertainty?27:28 Why do humans struggle with transitional periods?30:04 The 3 cognitive scripts that rule your life30:44 What is a cognitive script?32:11 What is the sequel script?33:35 What is the crowd pleaser script?34:20 What is the epic script?36:29 What should we do when we notice we are following a cognitive script?38:04 In defense of procrastination40:38 How can the triple check inform what we do next?42:09 What are magic windows?43:02 What is mindful productivity?43:41 What is mindful productivity’s most valuable resource?44:27 How does managing emotions influence productivity?45:10 What does death by two arrows mean?45:54 What’s the hardest part of knowing what to do next?46:34 How can we practice self-anthropology?
About Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. A former Google executive, she went back to university to earn a Ph.D. In Psychology & Neuroscience from King’s College London. As the founder of Ness Labs and author of its widely read newsletter, she writes about evidence-based ways for people to make the most of their minds, navigate uncertainty, and practice lifelong learning. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed academic journals and mainstream publications such as WIRED, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and more
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57 min - Berkeley professor explains gender theory | Judith Butler
Sex, gender, and the debate over identity explained by Berkeley professor Judith Butler.
What if gender wasn't a predetermined reality, but a fluid construct formed by culture, history, and individual identity? This is a question that drives the work of Judith Butler, a gender theorist and distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley.While acknowledging the biological realities of sex, Butler promotes the concept of gender as performative — something that is enacted and shaped through our actions and interactions. This view, although challenging to traditional perspectives, is instrumental in the discourse on queer, trans, and women's rights. Butler encourages a shift in societal conversation to include diverse gender identities.This transformation, they believe, allows us to work toward a society where equality, freedom, and justice are at the forefront, reinforcing the foundations of our democratic society.0:00 What is gender theory?1:34 Sex and gender: What’s the difference?2:29 Learning from genocide3:34 Queer theory in the 1970s & ’80s4:56 Big ideas in gender theory’s evolution7:06 Gender is “performative”: What that means9:04 The resistance to trans rights10:37 Countering the attack on gender----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Judith Butler:Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. They are most famous for the notion of gender performativity, but their work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.They have received countless awards for their teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, Yale's Brudner Prize, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.Their books include "Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity," "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex," "Undoing Gender," and "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?"----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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20 min - 3 biases fueling belief in conspiracy theories | Brian Klaas
**Why do conspiracy theories spread like wildfire?** Our brains are wired to seek patterns, reject randomness, and crave compelling narratives. This makes us especially vulnerable to grand conspiracies—stories that explain the world in neat, dramatic ways. From Princess Diana’s death to global political upheavals, people reject mundane explanations in favor of thrilling hidden plots. And with the internet amplifying misinformation like never before, conspiracy theories now shape politics, deepen polarization, and threaten democracy itself. **Can we clean up the information pipeline before truth becomes just another opinion?**
“The problem with conspiracy theories is they're not just telling you a story, they're telling you a really good story. There's a hidden cabal behind everything that's happening, there's a secret pattern that you just have to be smart enough to detect.”
The modern world is full of conspiratorial thinking: People see an event and come up with an extraordinary story, a “hidden truth” that explains everything. These extravagant stories are so sticky in our minds because we are predisposed to finding patterns and we're allergic to explanations that involve either randomness or banality, explains Brian Klaas, a professor and political scientist.This allergy to randomness is one of the reasons there is so much polarization and democratic breakdown around the world; because we simply inhabit different realities due to the fact that there has been such a surge in global conspiratorial thinking. So how can we fight these increasingly pervasive falsehoods?Our brains are driven to find explanations that fit a pattern and fit a narrative, a story that really compels us. When it comes to understanding conspiracy theories, there are 3 main cognitive biases that you need to grapple with.Timestamps: 0:00: The modern world and conspiratorial thinking1:56: 3 cognitive biases2:14: Narrative bias3:13: Magnitude bias4:49: Teleological bias
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About Brian Klaas:Dr. Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, an affiliate researcher at the University of Oxford, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is also the author five books, including Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (2024) and Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (2021). Klaas writes the popular The Garden of Forking Paths Substack and created the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, which has been downloaded roughly three million times.
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12 min - The 3 most difficult types of coworkers and how to deal with them | Amy Gallo for Big Think+
Harvard Business Review editor Amy Gallo shares the three worst types of coworkers and how to deal with them.
Positive work relationships, as Amy emphasizes, are not only nice to have but also crucial for performance, creativity and well-being. By prioritizing empathy and upfront communication, Gallo’s principles for managing tough conversations and engaging with difficult colleagues can help everyone create more generative, amiable professional communities.Looking to bring Amy's insights to leaders across your company? Great. This video is part of a 9-part expert class on mastering relationships at work — and it’s available to organizations that subscribe to Big Think+. Learn more about how Amy and 500+ other experts can help fuel your company’s leadership program today. ►https://bigthink.com/plus/great-leade...We all have coworkers that are harder to get along with than others. While there’s no way to prevent having crappy cubicle mates, there are strategies you can use to deal with them more effectively and make everyone’s life easier.Harvard Business Review editor Amy Gallo breaks down the eight archetypes of annoying coworkers and shares her strategies for dealing with the three toughest types.0:00 Intro0:35 Meet Amy Gallo1:18 The 8 archetypes for difficult colleagues2:04 The Passive Aggressive Peer3:08 The Insecure Boss3:53 The Tormentor--------------------
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10 min - Manage your emotions, in 9 minutes
Emotions are ancient, but your method for managing them doesn’t have to be. Psychologist and author Ethan Kross shares how modern science has given us surprising tools to manage our emotional reactions. From talking to yourself in the third person to building an ‘advisory board,’ Kross explains how small shifts in your regulation process can make a big impact on not just your own life, but on society as a whole.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------About Ethan Kross:Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. An award-winning professor and bestselling author in the University of Michigan’s top-ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------About The WellDo we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds.Together, let's learn from them.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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12 min - We have the tools to fix our food system. Why aren’t we using them? | Hannah Ritchie
**We are eating our way into climate disaster.**
Even if fossil fuel emissions ended *today*, our current food systems alone would still push us past the 1.5°C global warming target—and nearly exhaust our 2°C carbon budget. Food production isn’t just a contributor—it’s *the* leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, freshwater stress, and pollution.
🔍 **Key Drivers of Emissions:**
- **Land use change** (e.g., deforestation for agriculture)
- **Methane from livestock** (especially cows burping—called enteric fermentation)
- **Nitrous oxide** from fertilizers and manure
These are potent greenhouse gases, much stronger than CO₂.
🥩 **The Cost of Meat:**
Animal-based foods are alarmingly inefficient.
- **Cows**: 100 calories in feed → only 2 calories of meat
- **Chickens**: slightly better, but still 87% of feed calories lost
Even protein efficiency is dismal—less than 10–20% for most animals.
🥦 **Plant-based wins**:
Plant proteins can have **10–50x lower carbon emissions** per 100g of protein than beef or lamb.
📦 **Food Waste & Loss:**
We produce ~5,000 kcal/person/day, yet people only consume ~2,500 kcal. Why the gap?
- Feed inefficiencies (mostly from meat production)
- **Biofuel diversion**
- **Waste**—both consumer-level and supply chain losses.
One example? Crops rotting due to lack of basic storage like plastic crates. This is fixable.
🌱 **Two Key Solutions:**
1. **More productive agriculture** using improved seeds, fertilizers, irrigation to increase yields without expanding land.
2. **Changing diets**—not preaching, but *informed choices*. Reducing meat/dairy intake can dramatically lower one’s environmental impact.
💡 A well-planned plant-based diet can meet most nutritional needs—**except B12**, which must be supplemented.
**Bottom line:**
We can’t solve climate change without transforming what we eat and how we grow it. And the good news? Many of the solutions are already within reach.
0:00 Transforming our food systems1:14 Greenhouse gas emissions from food6:19 Increasing crop yields7:44 Changing our diets10:00 Calorie efficiency of animals14:50 Vertical farming17:30 The solutions to solve our food crisisAbout Hannah Ritchie:
Dr. Hannah Ritchie is Senior Researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford. She is also Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at Our World in Data. Her research appears regularly in the New York Times, The Economist, and the Financial Times, and in bestselling books including Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. She is the author of Not the End of the World.Folllow this Podcast for daily Episodes------------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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28 min - Michio Kaku has some news about simulation theory
Sorry, you’re not Neo and this isn’t "The Matrix." Michio Kaku gets real about simulation theory.
Are we all just living in an elaborate simulation?After movies like "The Matrix" (1999) posited the existence of a superficial world layered over our own, human imagination has run abound with theories about the nature of our reality. To a small but passionate minority, the red pill that can awaken us to this illusion is right at our fingertips.World-renowned physicist Michio Kaku isn’t quite ready to take that pill. In fact, he’s skeptical that the pills even exist. He explains why.---------------------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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7 min - Brian Cox: Why black holes could hold the secret to time and space | Full Interview
“Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity, a deeper theory of how reality, of how space and time works?”
Black holes are forcing us to rethink everything we know about the very foundations and limits of physics. These mysterious objects challenge our understanding of time, space, and information. In this full interview from 2023, Physicist Brian Cox explains why black holes aren’t just theoretical endpoints, but could lead us to a deeper understanding of reality altogether.What happens to information that falls into a black hole? Can space and time emerge from something more fundamental? And why did Einstein, Hawking, and generations of physicists struggle with the idea that these objects could even exist?Chapters:
00:00:00 Black holes and the edge of physics00:01:44 Hawking’s work00:02:47 Historical roots00:13:18 The “end of time” inside black holes00:20:26 The black hole information paradox00:24:31 Black holes and quantum computing00:26:04 Supermassive black holes and galaxy formation00:52:37 Alien life and the Fermi paradox00:56:10 Rare Earth hypothesis01:00:30 Von Neumann probes01:02:13 The Dark Forest Hypothesis01:06:32 The Great Filter01:09:09 Earth’s near-destruction01:10:11 The Great Silence01:14:38 Preserving intelligence-------------------------------------About Brian Cox:Brian Cox obtained a first class honors degree in physics from the University of Manchester in 1995 and in 1998 a Ph.D. In High Energy Particle Physics at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg. He is now Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester, The Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society.Brian is widely recognized as the foremost communicator for all things scientific, having presented a number of highly acclaimed science programs for the BBC watched by billions internationally including ‘Adventures in Space and Time’ (2021), ‘Universe’ (2021), ‘The Planets’ (2018), ‘Forces of Nature’ (2016), ‘Human Universe’ (2014), ‘Wonders of Life’ (2012), ‘Wonders of the Universe’ (2011) and ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ (2010).As an author, Brian has also sold over a million books worldwide including ‘Black Holes’, ‘Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos’, ‘Quantum Universe’ and ‘Why Does E=mc2?’ with co-author Professor Jeffrey Forshaw. He has set several world records for his sell-out live tours, including his most recent tour Horizons which has taken in venues across the globe.-------------------------------------------------06:30-19
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1 hr 26 min - Michio Kaku: This could finally solve Einstein's unfinished equation | Full Interview
“An equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, that would allow us to, quote, 'Read the mind of God.'”
What if everything we know about computing is on the verge of collapsing? Physicist Michio Kaku explores the next wave that could render traditional tech obsolete: Quantum computing.Quantum computers, Kaku argues, could unlock the secrets of life itself: and could allow us to finally advance Albert Einstein’s quest for a theory of everything.00:00:00 Quantum computing and Michio’s book Quantum Supremacy00:01:19 Einstein’s unfinished theory00:03:45 String theory as the "theory of everything" and quantum computers00:06:20 Quantum computers vs. Digital computers00:08:55 Real-world applications: Fertilizers, fusion energy, and medicine00:11:30 The global race for quantum supremacy00:14:05 Moore’s Law collapsing00:16:40 Quantum encryption and cybersecurity threats00:19:15 How quantum computers work00:21:50 The future of quantum biology00:24:30 Alan Turing’s legacy00:27:45 The history of computing00:31:10 Quantum supremacy achieved: What’s next?00:33:50 String theory explained00:38:20 Is the universe a simulation? 00:41:40 UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence00:45:15 Civilizations beyond Earth--------------------
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