Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Does our sense of self emerge from our brain's skill at lumping things into unchanging categories? What can we learn watching a caterpillar brain transition to a butterfly brain? Can we think of a memory as a pattern that stays alive and has its own life? Does an ant colony have a sense of self? Join Eagleman and biologist Michael Levin at Tufts – one of the most energetic and original thinkers in the field -- to dive into new territories of the self.

Every cell in your body changes, so why do you have a sense of continuity of the self – as though you're the same person you were a month ago? What does this have to do with the watercraft of the Greek demigod Theseus, or the End-of-History illusion, or why you go through so much trouble to make things comfortable for your future self, even though you don't know that person? And if there really were an afterlife, what age would your deity make everyone for living out their eternities? Join this week for a two-parter about the mysteries of selfhood.

Two certainties are death and taxes; a third is that people will work hard to avoid them both. But why is it so difficult to extend our lifespan? We know how to do it in worms and mice; why is it tricky in humans? Why do so few companies study longevity? What does the near future hold? What would it be like if everyone lived a much longer life? Join Eagleman this week with longevity expert Martin Borch Jensen to discuss the hopes and challenges of longevity science.

Why do brains dream, and why are dreams so bizarre? Why doesn't your clock work in your dreams? And even though you spend much of your working day looking at your cell phone and computer – why do they almost never make appearances in your dream content? Is dream content the same across cultures and across time? Are dreams experienced in black & white, or in color? Are dreams the strange love child of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet? What is the relationship between schizophrenia and dreaming? In the future, will we be able to read out the content of somebody's dream? Join Eagleman this week to learn why and how we spend a fraction of our sleep time locked in different realities, swimming in plots which aren't real but which compel us entirely nonetheless.

What is depression? Why are brains able to slip into it? Is depression detectable in animals? Do animals have options beyond fight or flight? And what does any of this have to do with measuring depression medications in city water supplies, reward pathways in the brain, the prevalence of tuberculosis, and zapping the head with magnetic stimulation? Join today's episode with David Eagleman and his guest -- psychiatrist Jonathan Downar -- for a deep dive into the brain science behind depression and what new solutions are on the horizon.

Why can you hear some sounds two different ways, depending on which word you’re looking at? Why do electrical outlets sometimes look like a face? How can you have rich visual experience with your eyes closed? Are some crosswalk buttons fake? Why are some pictures interpretable only once you’ve been told what to look for? And although brains are often celebrated for their parallel processing, what should they really be celebrated for? Tune in to learn what happens when the raw facts of the world collide with your expectations.

When he was a child, Eagleman fell off a roof and time seemed to run in slow motion. When he became a neuroscientist, he grew curious about the experience and collected hundreds of similar stories from others. But is it true that your brain can actually see in slow motion, like Neo in the Matrix? And how would you test that? Hear how he dropped volunteers from a tower to put the science to the test, and what the answer reveals about our perception, memory, and experience of the world.

What would it be like to have a vastly better memory than you do now?  What if you could remember what you were wearing on any day a dozen years ago? Or who you were with, what the conversation was, and whether it rained? Would it be a blessing or a curse? And if you’re forgetting a lot of your life, what might you do to better remember it? Join Eagleman with actress Marilu Henner, one of only dozens of people in the world diagnosed with highly superior autobiographical memory.

When you imagine something -- like the sun peeking over a mountain during an early morning rainstorm -- do you see it with rich visual detail, or instead with very little internal picture? In an earlier episode we tackled the spectrum of visual imagination, from hyperphantasia to aphantasia -- and in this episode we dive even deeper with guest Joel Pearson to surface the most surprising differences between people's internal lives. How does your experience differ from other people's, and how does your brain cobble together the skills you have to accomplish what you need?

Why do you see a unified image when you open your eyes, even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a small part of the world? 
What is special about the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, and what does that have to do with the way that you explore and come to understand the world? Are there new theories of how the brain operates? And in what ways is it doing something very different than current AI? Join Eagleman with guest Jeff Hawkins, theoretician and author of "A Thousand Brains" to dive into Hawkins' theory of many models running in the brain at once.