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Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black holes work? Do you wonder why you get emotional each time you see a certain movie, or how on...
Welcome to the May 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the on...
The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an...
Peter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a lead...
We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don't come very close to really understanding...
Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's th...
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristic...
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed b...
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some...
Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are u...
It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and...
For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts t...
Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection p...
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pr...
At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to m...
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carr...
Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of...
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered unc...
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals...
Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ram...
Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also t...
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accur...
The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human tho...
Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated re...
Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathem...
Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of...
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components...
Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what t...
Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple...
Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also...
"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individu...
In a relatively short period of time, exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have gone from an intriguing conjecture to an act...
The world is becoming pixelated. As computers and other digital devices become ubiquitous, human knowledge and communication and information...
It is not manifestly obvious that universities should be where most scholarly research is performed. One could imagine systems that separate...
Welcome to the August 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
The search for a foundational theory of quantum mechanics that all physicists can agree on remains active. Over the last century a number of...
When we think of the capacities that distinguish humans from other species, we generally turn to intelligence and its byproducts, including...
Quantum field theory is the basis for our most successful theories of fundamental physics. And yet, there are things we don't understand abo...
Welcome to the July 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
Our universe started out looking very simple: hot, dense, smooth, rapidly expanding. According to our best current model, it will end up loo...
It is common to refer to philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." But in the original quote, Alfred North Whitehead was more careful:...
Economics is seeing an upsurge in the importance of controlled, reproducible empirical studies. One area where this has had a great impact i...
The human brain is extremely complicated, but decades of careful neuroscientific research have revealed quite a bit about how it works, incl...
Welcome to the June 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
Einstein's general theory of relativity, plus some reasonable assumptions about the universe and what it's made of, has a remarkable implica...
Every time you see an apple spontaneously break away from a tree, it falls downward. You therefore claim that there is a law of physics: app...