When you make a decision about what food to order, what's happening in your brain? How do you clinch long-term decisions, like hitting the gym instead of doomscrolling? And what does any of this have to do with the ancient Greeks, alien hand syndrome, and constraining a president who wants to launch a nuclear bomb? Join Eagleman this week and next to discover how your brain weighs alternatives and nails down decisions.

From the brain’s point of view, what is humor? When something is funny, why do we breathe in and out rapidly? Do other animals laugh? Why do most jokes come in threes? What do mystery novelists, magicians, and comedians have in common? Could AI be truly funny? Join Eagleman this week to appreciate the tens of reasons and millions of years behind the tickling of your neural pathways.

What does neuroscience have to do with investment, and what does that have to do with Isaac Newton, the Dutch East India company, Kodak, the way zebras herd, our emotions, and almost 200 cognitive biases? Join Eagleman with guest Mark Matson, whose new book The American Dream dives into the cognitive illusions we face when trying to make investments.

You know that moment in the horror movie where the monster is coming closer, but the movie star doesn't see it? Why does that drive you crazy, and what does that teach us about brains? What is theory of mind, and why is it so important for everyone from poker players to conmen to stage magicians to novelists? Join us this week to dive into a fundamental skill of human brains -- and the question of whether current AI has any ability to simulate other people's minds.

Is your notion of yourself built on narrative that may or may not be accurate? If someone told you an entirely false story about yourself, could you come to believe it? What does that have to do with six people who spent over a decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit? Join Eagleman for part 2 of some mind-blowing conclusions about your account of your own life.

Why did lions look so strange in medieval European art? What does this have to do with Native American folklore, eyewitness memory of a car accident, or what a person remembers 3 years after witnessing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center? And what does any of this have to do with flashbulb memories, misinformation, and the telephone game that you played as a child? Join Eagleman for part 1 of an astonishing journey into what we believe about our memories.

What does the Baader-Meinhof Group, a West German terrorist group from the 1970s, have to do with  the front of your brain, attention, salience, and synchronicity? And why might you soon hear about the Baader-Meinhof Group again, not for political reasons, but for reasons to do with your own neural networks? Join Eagleman for a dive into how we take in the world around us -- and how we get fooled about the frequencies of events.

Why are the majority of stock trades decided by algorithms at timescales we can scarcely conceive of? What is it like to have the speed and power of a computer, and to be dealing with slow humans? Why are movies compelling, given that they are just a series of photographs flashed rapidly? And what happens if we someday discover planets with creatures who operate on totally different time scales? Join Eagleman this week for a deep dive into speed: the speed at which we operate, the speed at which our machines operate, and what this all means for the future as the divergence grows larger.

We're the single species who composes symphonies, erects skyscrapers, builds computers, and regularly gets off the planet. But how did human intelligence evolve from our ancestors in the animal kingdom? And now that our species is scintillatingly shrewd, what does a knowledge of our road mean as we work to build intelligence artificially? Join Eagleman this week with Max Bennett, an especially smart human who illuminates a path through the 600 million year story of brain power in his book "A Brief History of Intelligence".

Why are conspiracy theories a natural output of the brain? What do they have to do with puzzle-solving, cognitive dissonance, ingroups/outgroups, and storytelling? If you hear an unlikely explanation for something, what are effective and ineffective ways to assess it? Join Eagleman to understand from the point of view of the brain why conspiracy theories have always been so pervasive in human societies.