In this episode Garth interviews Steve Most from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Steve shares his approach to navigating the two-body academic problem with his wife, which has led to dual jobs in Sydney and continued adjunct affiliation with the University of Delaware. He describes early uncertainty about research, influential mentors, and how Dan Simons' visual cognition work and the "gorilla" selective attention task reshaped his interests, highlighting inattentional blindness and the role of attention in shaping conscious experience. He outlines his research on emotion-induced blindness and a newer program on effort aversion, including links to students' Psych 1 grades and planned applications to critical thinking and entrepreneurship. They discuss AI as cognitive offloading versus "desirable difficulties," his TEDx card-change demonstration, and his co-authored Oxford cognition textbook, emphasizing story-driven, real-world examples and interdisciplinary connections.

[Note. Portions of the show notes were generated by Descript AI.]