Inquiring Minds

This week, with guest co-host Majel Connery, we talk to author and researcher Karen Bakker about her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. 

The book explores stories of nonhuman sound and the often overlooked impact our own sound has on the natural world. Plus, things like: What do plants hear? How likely is interspecies communication? Will we one day be able to talk to dolphins? 

More info on Majel Connery, our guest host this week, can be found on her website.

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This week we talk to neuroscientist and author Patrick House about his new book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness. The book explores the complexity of consciousness and how it’s possible that it has thus far eluded explanation. To do so he examines one single study about consciousness nineteen different ways. It’s unorthodox, accessible, and remarkable.

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This week we talk to cognitive neuroscientist and multi-platinum record producer Susan Rogers about her new book This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You. 

In this episode:

• The science behind how we perceive and process music and how it can affect our emotions and sense of self
• How our brains develop the ability to process sound and how formal music training can help us become "auditory athletes," or people who can analyze sound on a deeper level
• The concept of the "default mode network," a group of brain structures that are active when we are “in our own heads,” and how our favorite records can light up this network and create a private, emotional connection with us. 
• Rogers talks about her time as Prince’s full-time recording engineer during which she worked on albums like Purple Rain. (!)

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This week we talk to behavioral scientist Michael Slepian about secrets: keeping them, telling them, and the powerful ways in which they influence our lives. His new book is The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are.

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The show this week features an interview with science writer Maria Konnikova about her book The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time. We recorded this interview back when the book first came in out in 2016, but it is, perhaps depressingly, still as relevant as ever. While it hasn’t always involved pillow salesmen and crypto billionaires, there have always been people trying to con you. So there’s no better time than right now to brush up on all the ways people get conned, the psychology of why it works, and what you can do to avoid it.

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This week we welcome back theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll to talk about how his most recent book, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, attempts to bridge the gap between how scientists talk about physics and how they usually go about explaining it to non-scientists. The goal is to help you understand what physicists are talking about—equations and all—without needing to know much more than some algebra.

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This week we’re joined by returning guest, animal behavior scientist, and autism rights advocate Temple Grandin to talk about her latest book Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions.

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This week: new research into using nanoparticles and programmable magnets to clean your teeth; a potentially breakthrough study on a drug for Alzheimer's disease featuring the first positive trial ever for a disease of aging; recapping NASA’s recent Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission; and a look into how much control you actually have over what Youtube decides to show you.

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This week we talk to theoretical physicist and cosmologist Antonio Padilla about his new book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity.

It’s a book about nine unusual numbers that, once understood, can help you grasp how the universe actually works—from black holes, to gravity, to the passing of time itself.

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This week we talk to Alexandra Horowitz from the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College about her new book The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves.

Horowitz’s book examines how a dog’s brain works and develops—how it dramatically changes during their first 12 months of life, her shifting perspective on dog cognition, and the vast differences between humans and dogs that we tend to overlook.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

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