Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

When a machine can remember your intellectual life and propose the next connection, is it still a tool or has it become part of the mind doing the thinking? In other words, who gets credit when AI supplies the crucial connection for an idea? Join Eagleman with Steven Johnson, historian of innovation & one of the creators of Gemini Notebook, as they wrestle with what happens when computers start thinking collaboratively with us.

This week we reach into the archive for one of the most popular episodes of Inner Cosmos.
Are there new colors you could see? And why are they impossible to imagine before you've seen them? Can you lose your color vision? And what does any of this have to do with linguistic color terms, why the military likes colorblind people for a particular task, and why Eagleman suggests that the cultural history of Thailand was influenced by one single, unknown neurodivergent?

This week we reach into the archive for one of the most popular episodes of Inner Cosmos.
Why do birds and bees choose different flowers? Why do mammals' eyes seem to be optimized for moving around at night, and what does that have to do with hairless humans getting angry? What does any of this have to do with road signs, camouflage, mantis shrimp, the sun, the dress that broke the internet, and women who can see more colors than you can?

Is your personality written into the circuitry of your brain? With brain disease, can someone lose who they are without realizing it? What happens when the person changing is the only one who can't see it? What does it mean to love someone whose personality has become unrecognizable? If you carried a genetic mutation that would alter your brain in the near future, would you want to know? Join Eagleman with bestselling author Robert Kolker to discuss these questions in the context of his new book about frontotemporal dementia, The Vanishing Family.

How do you get trillions of cells to collaborate as the single organism that we call you? Does that kind of cooperation create opportunities for hijacking -- for example, is cancer a form of "cellular cheating"? Can we take the lessons learned from biology and apply them to understanding politics? And what do models of cooperation tell us about building and living with AI? Join Eagleman with evolutionary biologist and cooperation theorist Athena Aktipis to understand cooperation and competition from cells to societies to our technological future.