Contemporary Neil Armstrong

Guest: Nils Larson, chief pilot at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.

Test pilots have made left footprints in history, literally. Neil Armstrong was a test pilot at the Dryden Flight Research Center before he became the first man to walk on the moon. Today the Dryden Flight Research Center has been renamed in honor of Armstrong and they still continue to perform cutting edge flight research. Learn from the perspective of their head test pilot what itis like to test one of a kind aircraft just like Neil Armstrong did.

 

Nature’s Signs

Guest: Tristan Gooley, New York Time’s Author of “How to Read Water,” “How to Read Nature,” “The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs,” and “The Natural Navigator.” Most recently the author of, “The Nature Instinct.”

There are two sorts of thinking, fast and slow, and in recent years we have began to favour slow: the methodical, analytical, and academic conscious thought processes we learn in school. Fast thinking is that which has been learned to the point where it happens, “without thinking,” and can be learned in our natural environments. If we can learn the “signs,” which indicate useful information, and pay attention to them, then we develop a, “sixth sense,” which is in no way mysterious, but is nevertheless magical and worth developing.

 

How do you prove you’re sane?

Guest: Susannah Cahalan, journalist and author of “Brain on Fire: My Monthof Madness” and “The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission that Changed Our Understanding of Madness”

“If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?” A landmark study in 1973 had eight healthy people feign hearing voices and seeing hallucinations to commit themselves to mental asylums. Once inside, they would have to prove their own sanity in order to escape. This watershed study by a popular and charismatic Stanford pyschologist reshaped the world’s understanding of madness, mental health, and diagnostic processes –but is it all fake?

 

Emotions don’t just happen to you –you help create them.

Guest: Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, professor of psychology & Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University.

We’ve come along way from the Freudian analysts of yesteryear who thought they could tell us all we need to know by sitting us on a couch and asking us about our childhood. And we no longer accept that what we think and do are just conditioned responses, like slobbering Pavlovian dogs. We’ve discovered some interesting drugs —and some of these have greatly helped on many struggling minds. But we don’t really know how they work, and often they don’t. Some of the mistakes of the past thankfully are behind us –lobotomies are out of fashion. But electroshock therapy has made a comeback of sorts. Never would have predicted that.