unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Is it possible to simplify life without losing the comfort and complexity that enriches it? 

John Maeda, vice president of artificial intelligence and design at Microsoft, has been writing about the intersection of design, technology, business, and life for years. His book, The Laws of Simplicity, explores the question of needing less while still getting something more. 

He and Greg discuss some of the pivotal moments in John’s career, how his view of design changed over the course of writing The Laws of Simplicity, and the aspects of business education that could use some tweaking. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Traditional design is not the same as customer-centricity

26:42: Business is about design thinking. It's different. It's customer-centricity. It's all the C words, whatever. But the way design is taught, like your microphone, is so beautiful. It's super cool-looking, right? That was created not just to be easy to use. It was also created to be "beautiful, stand out, et cetera," whatever—all these other factors that are not user-centered. They're ego-centered, which you could argue is like user-centered design, but it's different…[27:32] Traditional design is good at messing with your mind, your ego, and your wallet or purse. And it's fascinating. But it's not the same as customer-centricity. And that's what's so interesting about it and useful about it at certain times in a product's evolution.

Understanding powerful concepts of computer science

23:27:  There are certain concepts in computer science that are hard to understand because they're so powerful. So, I focus on what's powerful. And what's powerful is that it never gets tired. That's weird. It can loot forever. It is able to encompass large data sets at any scale and at any level of precision. So, it can handle infinitely large issues with infinitesimal accuracy. That is strange. And so, going through these properties helped me understand how weird it is. 

Two kinds of supply chain risks

10:32:  There are two kinds of supply chain risk. There's physical supply chain risk and digital supply chain risk. And a physical supply chain – we know what that looks like in our heads, or optimized with Amazon robots, etc. But a digital supply chain is like building on top of Azure, and Azure goes down. Whoa, what do you do? Or you've built your organization's communication system on Slack, and it goes down. Like, what do you do? So that's an invisible supply chain that we're just starting to understand in business, and they're very similar. Unless you're cyber-equipped, it's just that you can't see the kind of analogy you could make between the two worlds.

On being equipped to explain computation

30:13: I realized how powerful computation is, and I realized that anyone can explain design better than me. What is something that I'm equipped to do? Oh, I can explain computation. So, I wanted to make a way to explain to any business leader what computation is. Because if they don't understand it, they can't digitally transform.

• Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
• Moore’s Law
• Donald Knuth
• Traitorous Eight

• Automattic Advisory Council Profile at MIT Media Lab
• Professional Website
• John Maeda on LinkedIn
• John Maeda on Twitter
• John Maeda on YouTube
• John Maeda on TEDTalk
•  John Madea on Talks at Google

• The Laws of Simplicity
• How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us
• Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) 
• Creative Code: Aesthetics + Computation

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Will the subjects we debate in education still be relevant a century from now? There are enduring controversies and tensions in education that continue even today.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and also the author of a number of books in the field of Education History. His latest work is Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools, and he is also the author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America. 

Jonathan and Greg discuss the dichotomy between research and teaching in the Higher Education system, unravel the implications of student evaluations, the necessity for peer review of teaching, and how the dynamics of teaching and learning, as relationship-based activities, leave a lasting impact on lives.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What is the most effective way of teaching?

20:56: There's been a growing body of research about effective teaching, and there's a pretty strong and robust consensus about what's most effective, and the most effective teaching is the teaching that engages people in their own learning, right? It creates activities that very specifically require the students to ask and answer questions in the way the discipline does. So, the best history course makes people behave like historians, and the best chemistry course makes people behave like chemists. Now, if they've been socialized to sit there and do not a whole lot, they may bridle at that. That's life. Maybe I would, too, if I were them. But look, if our knowledge and professional authority means anything, it means that we know some things they don't, right? And one of the things we know is that they'll learn more if they are engaged in the questions of the discipline. And I think there are many good ways to do that, by the way.

Is education always political?

02:20: We're always going to have controversies around education because education is where we decide who we are. Education is the realm in which the people of a nation decide what the nation means and where they stand vis-à-vis it. So it's always political, it's always contentious, and we will always argue about it.

History as a moral discipline

59:09: I think history is a moral discipline. That's what it is: a bunch of stories, but these stories are morality plays in a very real way. And when these institutions we work at started, it was taken for granted that the faculty were in the business of trying to make better people. That was just a prima facie assumption.

Why do we have to be in the same room?

30:13: Why do we have to be in the same room? And I ask that of my students all the time. And I tell them, if I am just going to talk to you, I think I could just be on a screen. There's got to be something else. There's got to be some exchange. There's got to be some activity. If I'm just going to draw at you, you might as well replace me with a computer, but I think that should be the question that every single faculty member is required to answer. And there are many good answers, but you shouldn't be able to evade the question. Why are we in the same room? That should be the question in the frontal lobes of everybody, because we don't have to be.

• Mark Hopkins
• Madrasa
• David Riesman
• Clark Kerr
• Lawrence Summers
• Lies My Teacher Told Me
• Eric Hobsbawm
• John Dewey
• Bruce lenthall - Center for Teaching & Learning

• Faculty Profile at Penn GSE
• Faculty Profile at Penn Arts & Sciences

• Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools
• Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn
• The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America
• The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools
• Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
• Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know
• Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory
• Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century
• Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925

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What technological and societal factors led to the rise of the large corporation in 20th-century America?

Richard N. Langlois is an economics professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of the book The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. His work examines the economics of organizations, business history, and theories of firm performance and innovation. 

Richard and Greg discuss the rise and fall of the managerial era in American corporations, common misconceptions about antitrust laws, and companies’ influence on the political system. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why does Schumpeterian innovation work?

47:35: In the real world, you have to learn how to produce things. And that knowledge is private information most of the time. And so, you learn how to make a car a certain way… [48:09] So, if you're always spending your time looking for new ideas, you're not going to get good at the things you're doing, or you can focus on the things that you're doing and get good at them, but then you're going to be bad at looking around…But in the end, I think it's the case that if you get really good at one thing, like operating systems or big office computing systems, just the fact of getting good at that, it's going to make it hard for you to be good at other things, especially at other things that are different from what you're doing because there's a lot of barriers there. 

The threat of antitrust can influence organizational decisions

34:57: The threat of antitrust or other public policies can influence organizational division decisions inside a firm, often in ways that are inefficient or that maybe aren't the best way to do things.

Do big firms control the government?

50:22: Companies are very good at influencing the government when some narrow thing really affects them, like a tariff on something. But influencing the government in some general way—what the results show is that companies don't care. They'll give money to whoever's going to leave them alone.

On considering how exogenous factors influence organizations, not just internal factors.

05:43: We need to think more about the ways in which these exogenous factors influence internal organizations instead of only thinking about organization from an internal point of view. So, how do we organize? How do we manage? How should we structure it? We also want to think about what the external constraints on organizational forms are. It may lead us to create organizational forms that aren't the kinds that we would have chosen in a perfect world.

• Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
• Joseph Schumpeter
• Ronald Coase
• Oliver Williamson
• Sherman Antitrust Act
• The Folklore of Capitalism by Thurman Arnold and Reeve Robert Brenner
• Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity by Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark

• Faculty Profile at University of Connecticut
• Richard N. Langlois on LinkedIn

• The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise 
• Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy 
• Firms, Markets and Economic Change: A dynamic Theory of Business Institutions
• Other Scholarly Articles

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Do you find communication a necessary evil rather than a tool for success? How can you use communication as a fundamental key to success in both your personal and professional lives?

Matt Abrahams is a Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, podcaster, and author. His latest book is Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You're Put on the Spot. 

Matt and Greg dissect the difference between rehearsed and spontaneous communication, demonstrating how mastering both is within reach and discuss the pivotal role of mindset and attitude in the journey to effective communication. Matt gives insight on both providing and receiving feedback, and they explore how communication styles and preferences change between eras and age groups. Matt reveals how stories and structures enhance communication and how anyone can get better at communication with practice.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is there a universally 'correct' way to communicate?

16:52: There is no one right way to communicate. There are better ways and worse ways, but no one right way. And when you put pressure on yourself to do it right, however you define that, you actually almost guarantee you will do it more poorly. Why? Your brain is like a computer. It's not a perfect analogy, but for this, it works. You only have so much processing power. You only have so much bandwidth. And if part of your bandwidth is being exercised by evaluating what you're doing, as you're doing it, the entire time you're doing it, you have less bandwidth to focus on what you're saying. So, I'm not saying we don't judge and evaluate our communication—you must. But if we can turn that volume down a little bit and just allow ourselves to do what comes naturally, we will typically do better because we have more bandwidth to focus on what we're doing.

A structure is not a script, it’s a roadmap

37:11: Structure is not about memorizing and hitting certain points; it's about directionality, and that can be helpful. And I'm not saying every communication needs to be structured in this way. But for people who are nervous and are novice to the particular circumstances they're in, having a structure helps you get through that communication.

On setting up an environment where people are comfortable communicatin

19:17: I firmly believe that we need to hear from as many people as we can to make good decisions. So it is incumbent on those of us in leadership roles—those of us who are teachers, parents—to set up environments where people feel comfortable. And what that means is to encourage people speaking, to listen when they speak, and to make sure that you prize people exploring ideas so you don't shut them down. You don't make people feel bad when they make mistakes. We have to actually set those environments up, and it is incumbent on all of us in positions of status and power to do that, and you do that partially by saying it but, more importantly, by demonstrating it.

What are the three parts of goals?

15:163: A goal has three parts: know, feel, do. You should say, "What is it I want people to know? How do I want them to feel? What is it I might want them to do?" As an intention going into a spontaneous speaking situation, but I don't do as politicians and some business leaders are coached to just morph everything to my goal. I think that leads to some of this disingenuous interaction. So I think it is possible to be goal-driven. I think it is possible to be authentic and, at the same time, spontaneous, adjust, and adapt. But that comes with practice and a little bit of letting go of the pressure we put on ourselves to do these things so right. And it's that pressure that can also make it feel artificial and inauthentic.

• Think Fast Talk Smart Podcast - Greg Leblanc Episode
• Trevor Wallace
• Adam Tobin
• Jeffery Pfeffer
• Kim Scott
• Collins Dobbs - Space, Pace, and Grace
• David Eaglesman
• Susain Cain

• Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Matt Abrahams' Website
• Matt Abrahams on LinkedIn
• Matt Abrahams on YouTube
• Matt Abrahams on TEDxPaloAlto
• NoFreakingSpeaking.com

• Think Fast Talk Smart Podcast
• Think Faster Talk Smarter Book
• Speaking Up Without Freaking Out

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Many scholars and philosophers have taken the stance that empathy hinders the true pursuit of knowledge and justice. But our guest today takes the opposite approach.

Heidi L. Maibom is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and the University of the Basque Country. Her book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, argues that not only is empathy indispensable, but it's impossible to acquire knowledge about this world and ourselves without it. 

She and Greg discuss the place empathy occupies in philosophy, the different types of perspectives that go along with empathizing, and whether or not it's possible to have too much empathy. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Empathy is many things

44:18: Empathy is many things, and that's partly why I find it distressing to read so many dismissals of empathy which focus on it as one thing. Either you have to understand the other person entirely—their entire history, their experiences, and so forth and so on. Of course we can't empathize in that way. Or you are empathizing with them as an act of "I know better than you," and so forth. We're empathizing with people for all kinds of reasons. It's important to appreciate that and also to then focus your empathy in the right way, depending on what kind of project you're engaging.

Does empathy require identification?

21:08: Empathy requires some amount of identification. But the identification is interesting because, in essence, what you're trying to do is map the other person's subjectivity onto your own. That's why you have to find a situation of your own that you have experience with to map that situation on. But at the same time, of course, you have to be aware of the ways in which you differ from the other person.

Can you have too much empathy?

49:05: People who are empathetic are more vulnerable to exploitation from others, to gaslighting perhaps, right? So, being empathetic comes with dangers and advantages. But I think that if we try to go back to this notion of the shape of subjectivity, being how I experience things as the one who acts and who thinks and so forth, then I think that when you then try to understand yourself, taking the perspective, as it were, from the inside, taking a perspective from the outside, as little engaged with yourself as you can be, as it were, and then if you are in a particular interaction with somebody else, the victim or the perpetrator perspective, in addition.

How does philosophy of emotions tie with philosophy of empathy?

36:02: There's a tremendous amount of information that we can derive from a successful act of emotionally empathizing with someone. And more information than from simply empathizing with a thought or thinking, okay, here is exactly what they're thinking. I think emotions are richer. It just gives us more information, and there's important aspects to an emotion, namely from the perspective of closeness with another person, from feeling understood, just seeing that another person is emoting. It's incredibly important, but there's also all this information that we shouldn't ignore that is really crucial and very helpful for understanding this. 

• Voltaire
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• René Descartes

• Heidi L. Maibom's Website
• Heidi L. Maibom on Twitter

• The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works
• Empathy (New Problems of Philosophy)
• The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy)

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Does the financial world need a shake-up? By venturing into the minds of Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot, two outliers who challenge the status quo of modern portfolio theory and efficient market hypothesis, we can find groundbreaking theories with implications for the financial sphere, especially in the face of unpredictable "Black Swan" events.

Scott Patterson is a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and also the author of Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis, Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market, and The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, all of which factor into this episode.

Scott and Greg discuss the financial ups and downs of the stock market and traders who tried to ride the wave or predict when bubbles were going to burst. Scott talks about covering climate change for the Journal and the way it complicates predicting what start-ups will end up on top. Dive into the subtle and sometimes blurry distinctions between investing and gambling and find out what can make a company shut off its computers on this episode of UnSILOed.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is climate change the big dog in the world of crises?

42:12: Climate change is what I write about in the journal—that's my beat—so I wanted the book (Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis) to be not just about buying out-of- the-money options to protect your portfolio. I wanted it to be broader in terms of thinking about the risks that we face. And that's in the subtitle of the book, The New Age of Crisis, which I try to make an argument that we're entering a world of crises that are manifesting and overlapping more and magnifying the nature of the crisis. Some people call it the polycrisis, and climate, I think, is the big dog in that crisis world.

On the risk of high-speed contagion across markets

36:00: The risk of a high-speed contagion across markets is something we should be concerned about...[36:33] With high-speed trading, I was on the front lines there reporting it. It wasn't a well-known phenomenon. And I found it very alarming that the financial markets evolved into this race to trade microseconds faster than the next guy.

The inconvenient truth of ignoring fat tails

06:55: Nassim [Taleb] one time showed me an email that he'd gotten from a very well-known, respected academic in finance, who conceded to Nassim that, yes, we know that these fat tails exist, but our models don't work if we incorporate them into the models. And that's the problem: if you recognize that there is potential for three, four, five sigma events, then you have to put a fat tail into the model. And that's fine. But as long as the people running trading desks and executives understand that if you have a value-at-risk model, it's not capturing the real risk that you're going to be facing because it carves out 5 percent of the volatility, of the extreme volatility over a year.

Is high-speed computer trading a threat to financial markets?

38:32: In 2020, there were some extremely insane things going on in the markets, and I think probably negative oil prices and bonds. You couldn't buy a Treasury bond or sell a Treasury bond for a while at one point. Not normal. But I think a lot of that was not just an exogenous event: COVID was causing the global economy to seize up, and that moved into financial markets. Central bankers came in and threw a bunch of money at it, and cleaned out the pipes. But this idea of a high-speed computer-driven contagion is something I've always been concerned about, but I don't think we've seen that yet.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Benoit Mandelbrot
• Mark Spitznagel
• CalPERS
• Universa
• Recency Bias
• Empirica Capital
• Black Swan Theory
• Robert Litterman
• Fischer Black

• Professional Profile on Wall Street Journal
• Scott Patterson on LinkedIn
• Scott Patterson on X

• Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
• Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
• The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It
• Wall Street Journal Articles
• Muck Rack Articles

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As we navigate life's challenges, it's crucial we confront the subjects that often remain unspoken out of fear or misunderstanding. Both modern and ancient philosophers have had the wisdom to lead about the tough topics of suicide and addiction, and the nature of their complexities can be informed by both philosophy and science.

Clancy Martin, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City and also the author of several books in both the categories of fiction and nonfiction. His latest nonfiction work is titled How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, and Clancy talks with Greg about this book as well as his previous nonfiction work Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love, and several of his fiction titles.

Clancy shares his personal experiences with the complexities of suicidal ideation and its relationship with addiction, illuminating the power of narrative in preventing suicide and fostering understanding. They also dive into the Christian and Buddhist perspectives on suicide and suffering to examine these concepts from the lens of religion, and Clancy shares personal stories of how his work has directly affected the lives of others.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Distraction as a lifesaving tool

17:42: When a person is in a moment of real crisis, right on the brink, I think distraction and busyness can be very helpful. The reason I think it can be helpful is that when you're really in that moment of crisis, where you're thinking about taking your own life and maybe about to do it…[18:18]your thinking at that point is not clear at all. So, in advance of that moment, if you know you're predisposed to this, you should have some strategies in place to distract yourself. And distraction at that point, I think, is a fantastic tool. You should get up and take a walk. You should text a friend. You should consider calling a number like 988, a mental health line. You need to recognize and you need to open your blinders a little bit so you can see that there are other options. You need to lessen the pressure a little bit and ease the pain a little bit, because you're not thinking clearly.

Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?

20:39: You can't really love other human beings until you start engaging with these meaning-of-life questions, which require tremendous courage and do require you to turn away from constantly distracting yourself.

Is addiction a way to escape intimacy and vulnerability?

35:17: An addiction is just this way of running away, of escaping from the terrible, scary vulnerability that comes with intimacy, and ultimately, from the fact that your life really does have meaning and is really important. But it's a frightening thought, actually. The more you think about that thought, that your life is really, really important as a function of its interaction with other people's lives, that is scary, and maybe ought to be a little bit scary, but being willing to embrace that scariness.

The truth about addiction

17:42: The more we think about all of these little addictions we have, the more we might have a tendency to recognize that they are ways of running away from ourselves rather than ways of accepting ourselves. And the person who attempts suicide is just kind of on the extreme end of that scale.

• Albert Camus
• Augustine of Hippo
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Alcoholics Anonymous
• Emil Cioran
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Dalit
• The Papageno Effect

• Faculty Profile at UMKC
• Professional PhilPeople
• Clancy Martin on LinkedIn

• How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind
• Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love
• How to Sell: A Novel
• Bad Sex
• Introducing Philosophy
• Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader
• Love in Central America
• Ethics Across the Professions: A Reader for Professional Ethics
• The Philosophy of Deception
• Morality and the Good Life: An Introduction to Ethics Through Classical Sources
• Since Socrates: A Concise Source Book of Classic Readings
• Google Scholar Page
• The Great Courses

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Humans are creatures of habit. We have habits for talking, eating, walking, sleeping–we don’t question these habits; much of it happens on autopilot. But it’s through art and philosophy that allows us to take a step back from those habits and examine them in a meaningful way.

This is the argument that Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, makes in his book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. He’s also written a number of books that tackle philosophical questions surrounding how humans interact with the world, like Action in Perception and Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World. 

Alva and Greg discuss how art and philosophy help us break free from the habits we’re saddled with, what’s really happening in the brain when we deem something “aesthetic,” and what it means to truly see the world. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Philosophy and life are entangled

19:49: I think philosophy happens throughout our lives. It happens not only in the law, it happens in the laboratory, and it probably happens in your discussions with your partner at the dinner table sometimes. Art [and] philosophy is a moment in our thought processes. So, in a way, I want to say that there is all the difference in the world between business as usual and the work of philosophy and art. But outside in the wild of our lives, whether our legal lives, our political lives, our social lives, our family lives, there’s lots of opportunities for art and philosophy.

There is no STEM without art and philosophy

06:23: Art and philosophy are really important, and they are important in ways that the popular ideas in our civilization at the moment about the preeminence of science, technology, engineering, and math, this kind of STEM worldview really misses the point. There is no STEM without art and philosophy.

Language isn't an automatic thing that we do following the rules blindly

38:39: To be a language user is to have resources for coping with problems that arise in the course of that activity: misunderstandings, needs for clarifications, demands for repetitions, or justifications. So, to be a speaker is not just to do this kind of automatic thing. It's to be able to reflect on what we're doing. So, the ability to reflect is presupposed at the ground level. See, this is why I want to resist the hierarchy idea because there are two levels. There's the use of language, and there's the reflection about language. But it turns out that the ability to be a user of language presupposes that you're also able to reflect on language.

Great philosophers start debates

13:36: What makes a philosopher a great philosopher? Not that they landed on the truth, and we all know it, but rather that they started a debate that we're still having. That's what greatness is. So, as a philosopher, I'm very interested in what is the value of these non-utilitarian things that are so important to us. Why are they so important to us? And, that's where I want to say, actually, they are opportunities for us to finally grow and change and not just be trapped by the habits of culture, by the ways of doing things.

• James Baldwin
• Seeing Through Clothes by Anne Hollander
• John Ruskin
• P.F. Strawson
• Roy Harris
• Hubert Dreyfus
• Ian Hacking

• Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley 
• Alva Noë on Website
• Alva Noë on LinkedIn
• Alva Noë on Twitter
• Alva Noë on Talks at Google

• The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are
• Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature 
• Action in Perception
• Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
• Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World
• Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark

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What if we haven’t unlocked the true potential of our senses because we simply don't pay enough attention to them? 

Writer and filmmaker Jackie Higgins explores human senses by comparing them to their animal counterparts in her book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. Spoiler alert: Human senses are far more powerful than we give them credit for, and there’s a lot more than just five. 

Jackie and Greg discuss how culture impacts the way we perceive the world, examples of animals that have similar senses to ours, and certain case studies that show how humans could refine their senses to be much more powerful than previously thought.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On the two types of touch

19:34: I split touch into two types of touch, two big headings of touch. One of them is the discriminative touch. This idea that you take a walnut and roll it around in your hand. And you can feel its roughness, and you can feel the corrugations, and you can feel the size of it, and you can feel the curves. And if you perhaps put it in your pocket, you can feel your fingers being stretched, the skin being stretched by it. Different senses for discriminative touch will be involved in that. But, there is another sense of touch called affective or emotional touch. And I was expecting touch to be quite a pedestrian story. I thought I knew a lot about touch, and I was completely blown away by how little we know about touch.

Culture's influence on perception

04:02: If your language and culture imbue a certain way to perceive the world, that's as important as the senses in our bodies firing and sending information to our brain.

Do we take our senses for granted until we lose them?

40:54: Our brain is scooting off in other directions. We're rarely present in the sensory information that the world is giving us at that moment in time...And that was part of the message of the book, which is when you take time, time out. I think if we take time out and focus on these senses, they'll surprise you.

The relationship between our brain and smell perception

10:21: Neuroscientists looking at smell would say that the brain is the place where we may have far fewer receptors, a little bit like the shrimp tail; it's a kind of echo of that. But studies have been done on how good we are at fine-dividing sense, recognizing sense, and following sense. Some scientists at your university had some students stand on their knees following a string dipped in chocolate to see how good they were at being dogs, so they were remarkably good. And we have fewer senses, but yes, our brain—there are very many areas in our brain that are dedicated to figuring out and creating smell perceptions.

• The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf
• Selig Hecht
• Helen Keller
• Eşref Armağan
• Joseph Kirschvink
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat

• Author’s Profile on Pan Macmillian
• Jackie Higgins Website
• Jackie Higgins on X

• Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses
• Article on Interalia Magazine

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Can you imagine the brain's intricate dance that helps us maintain balance? How does this process connect with vertigo, cognitive decline, and even our emotions and decision-making?

Paul Thagard is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo and the author of several books. His latest release is titled Balance: How It Works and What It Means, and next year his new book, Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It, will be published.

Paul and Greg discuss Paul’s research into the brain and the way it handles certain tasks. Paul sheds light on how balance and nausea are linked and also how misinformation commonly weaves its way into our knowledge base. Learn about the surprising links between vertigo and nausea as he explains how our brains influence our lives in nuanced ways.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Cognition and emotion are constantly integrated

19:09: So, the idea that cognition and emotion are separate in the brain is all wrong. They're constantly integrated, and it's a really good thing because it means that the perceptions that we're doing, the predictions that we're making, the explanations we're coming up, are all tied with the explanations of current ways in which our situation is relevant to our goals. So emotion, instead of just being something that somehow gets in the way of cognition or is extraneous to it, is actually tightly integrated with it, and that's one of the great powers of the human brain.

Is balance conscious?

10:32: Balance is mostly unconscious because almost all the things you do, when you're walking down the street or even just sitting in front of a TV, doesn't involve thinking about it. But when consciousness becomes important, balance breaks.

Misinformation is a major issue in everyday life

58:19: In decision-making and ethics in general, empathy is really important—that is, you've got to be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and figure out why they're feeling the way they are. But the solution for this isn't just courses in critical thinking—I never thought of my book on misinformation as being a critical thinking textbook. It's not a textbook at all. But it's a book that I hope will make it clear to people that all these problems of information and misinformation are major issues in everyday life.

Is there something wrong with the way that economists talk about goals?

48:45: The economist's way of talking about goals is just ridiculous. But they think of values as preferences. Well, where do preferences come from? Preferences come from goals and emotions. And so the fundamental idea here is that goals and emotions and preferences are derivative.

• Integrated information theory
• Broadcasting Theories
• Semantic pointer competition vs. information integration
• How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) 

• Faculty Profile at University of Waterloo
• Paul Thagard's Website
• Paul Thagard on LinkedIn

• Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It
• Paul Thagard Amazon Author Page
• Balance: How It Works and What It Means
• Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?
• Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions
• Natural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and Beauty
• The Brain and the Meaning of Life
• Hot Thought: Mechanisms And Applications of Emotional Cognition
• Google Scholar Articles
• Psychology Today Articles

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