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 t...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 1 min
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.
Mar 02, 2023•47 min
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 "de...
Dec 24, 2022•49 min
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 .
Dec 09, 2022•39 min
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 ps...
Nov 25, 2022•39 min
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.
Oct 31, 2022•29 min
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 .
Oct 19, 2022•33 min
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.
Oct 10, 2022•25 min
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.
Oct 03, 2022•35 min
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...
Sep 27, 2022•43 min
This week we talk to cognitive neuroscientist Chantel Prat about her new book The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain is Different and How to Understand Yours . The book is the result of Prat’s decades of work on the biological basis of individual differences in cognition—what makes you you . Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
Aug 10, 2022•42 min
This week we talk to philosopher and animal ethicist David Peña-Guzmán about his new book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness . David explores the idea that there really is a subjective world—a dream world—that lights up when animals sleep, what that actually looks like, and its moral implications. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
Jul 17, 2022•51 min
This week we’re joined by podcaster, journalist, and author David McRaney to discuss his latest book How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. It’s a deep look at what we know about what it takes to change someone’s mind and why it’s more complicated than you might think. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
Jul 05, 2022•51 min
This week we welcome back James Beard award winning food science writer J. Kenji López-Alt. He talks about growing up around science, studying architecture at MIT, and how, strangely enough, both subjects pertain to cooking. Kenji is the author of the bestselling The Food Lab and the recently released The Wok: Recipes and Techniques . Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
Jun 29, 2022•58 min
You might not be aware of it, but the UK is experiencing a wildlife crisis. Ecologist Derek Gow joins us this week to talk about what we ought to do about it and how he’s trying to rewild the country with his farm-turned-wildlife breeding center. Gow wrote the bestselling Bringing Back the Beaver and will soon release his latest book Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species . Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds...
Jun 01, 2022•41 min
On the show this week we’re joined by naturalist, author, and returning guest Sy Montgomery. Throughout her career, Montgomery has repeatedly shown an incredible ability to understand, befriend, and interact with animals. We last heard from her in episode #128 where she talked about her 2016 book The Soul of an Octopus , but she’s written about everything from tigers to snakes to hummingbirds. In this episode we explore her latest book, where she covers her perhaps most challenging animal yet, T...
May 24, 2022•44 min
On the show this week we’re joined by Brian Butterworth, emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology and author of the new book Can Fish Count? What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds. He’s spent his career looking at the genetics and neuroscience of mathematical ability—and not just in humans. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
May 17, 2022•43 min
How do you feel fear and be creative anyway? How is letting your mind wander key to coming up with, and following through on, creative ideas? Returning to the show this week is journalist Matt Richtel, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series on distracted driving, and author of numerous books. His latest book, Inspired: Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul, is devoted to a deeper understanding of creativity and he joins us this week...
May 03, 2022•48 min
How do you define how painful something is? On the show this week we welcome back physician, writer, and clinical researcher Haider Warraich to talk about his new book The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain . Warraich explores the idea that far from being something objective and easily defined, pain is complex, misunderstood, and culturally influenced. The book delves into the history of pain and explains how our understanding of it has been “shaped not just by science but by politics a...
Apr 19, 2022•48 min
This week we’re joined by Benjamin Ehrlich, author of The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron. It’s a book about the discoveries and life of Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who has been called the ‘father of modern neuroscience.’ While today relatively unknown outside of his field, Cajal’s discoveries about the brain changed the field of neuroscience forever. In 1906 he won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on neurons, which he called ...
Apr 04, 2022•34 min
This week, we examine a recent discovery that certain types of cancer cells may allow us to better understand how cells adapt to the intracellular environment (and explain what the intracellular environment is). Indre discusses how she and her students have recently been working on methods of measuring creativity. And we look at some new research focusing on the hunting method used by archerfish in order to study aspects of visual perception. Inquiring Minds website Support the show: https://www...
Mar 17, 2022•25 min
During the pandemic, one thing we’ve had a little more of--at least sometimes--is time. Time to panic and stress and worry, but also time to think and reflect. This week, in the spirit of reflection, we’re revisiting a conversation with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll recorded back in 2016. At the time he had just written a book called The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself , which explores questions about purpose and belief and meaning. Today, in 2022, his ...
Mar 07, 2022•40 min
We can never know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat. Or even if there is something that it is like for a bat to be a bat. But if there is something, we would speculate that the bat has some kind of consciousness or sentience. That’s the argument Jackie Higgins makes in her new book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, in which she takes us on a deep dive into the sensory experience of many different animals, from fish to owls, to moles, to cheetahs . Jackie is a te...
Feb 25, 2022•36 min
One of the fascinating things about neuroscience is that it gives us something tangible to study in the biology of the brain that can tell us something about the mind, which is so intangible. But what if that approach leaves us missing a big piece of the puzzle? What if the mind actually extends far beyond the biology of the body? Today, Indre is joined by Annie Murphy Paul, an acclaimed science writer, who makes this claim in her new book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Bra...
Feb 17, 2022•42 min
More than a hundred million people watched the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, which focused on our fear that something could crash into our planet from space and destroy it. But what if things that come from space don’t just have the potential to destroy life but also to create it? That’s Greg Brennecka’s argument, and he joins Indre on today’s episode to talk all about it. Greg is a staff scientist and cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose research has appeared in Science ...
Feb 10, 2022•37 min
In this week’s episode, Indre revisits a topic that has been covered a couple of times on the podcast: addiction. This time, she’s joined by addiction physician and bioethicist Carl Erik Fisher, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University. Carl works at the intersection of law, ethics, and psychiatry and has had his own struggles with addiction, which he documents in his new book, The Urge: Our History of Addiction. He discusses this fascinating book and so much more in his...
Jan 28, 2022•42 min
In this last episode of 2021, Adam Bristol joins Indre to talk about the major highlights of 2021, one being the journey through COVID. They map out the key episodes of Inquiring Minds throughout 2021, talk through their personal highlights, and recommend books to read. Recapping episodes touching on the history of quarantine, food and science, the interaction between nature and humans, and quantitative approaches to human dating, today’s episode wraps up 2021 in a neat bow, providing an excelle...
Dec 28, 2021•27 min
The holidays are a time for storytelling, and what better story to re-experience than the greatest one of all: the history of the universe and life on Earth. In today’s episode, Indre is joined by writer and editor Henry Gee to discuss this most epic of all stories and how it’s depicted in Henry’s new book, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth . Henry is a senior editor at Nature and the author of several books, including Jacob’s Ladder, In Search of Deep Time, and The Accidental Species. He’...
Dec 20, 2021•48 min
In this episode, Emily Willingham joins Indre to talk about tailoring the brain, a subject on which she’s an expert and about which she writes extensively in her book The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship, A User's Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter. Emily is a journalist, a science writer, the author of previous books, including Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis , a coauthor of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four ...
Dec 13, 2021•34 min
In today's up to date episode, Adam Bristol is back to highlight three scientific papers that have caught his eye lately. The first two are about our evolutionary history of life on this planet, filling in some of the holes in the fossil record, and making some unexpected discoveries along the way. The third paper has us looking at potential biosecurity concerns in the distant future, which may actually arise earlier than expected given humans' exploration of planets. From the distant past to th...
Nov 25, 2021•23 min
