Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchSteve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)
As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brai…
5 months, 1 week ago
Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)
Episode 44
What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine withou…
5 months, 1 week ago
Rafael Yuste, "Lectures in Neuroscience" (Columbia UP, 2023)
The human brain is perhaps the most intricate and fascinating object in the known universe. Through a mysterious process, the activity of billions o…
5 months, 1 week ago
Dagomar Degroot, "Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Our solar system is a dynamic arena where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet …
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Episode 39
Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim…
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Episode 379
How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a…
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021)
Episode 165
An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoi…
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Episode 157
Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and …
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)
Episode 182
In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forens…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Episode 71
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As …
5 months, 3 weeks ago