All Episodes

#559 Thomas Metzinger: Consciousness, Subjectivity, the Self, and the Ethics of AI

Dec 10, 2021

Dr. Thomas K. Metzinger is senior research professor at the department of philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. From 2014-2019 he was a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College. He is the founder and director of the MIND group and Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany. His research centers on analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. More»
#558 Justin Barrett - Thriving with Stone Age Minds; Evo Psych, Christian Faith, and Flourishing

Dec 9, 2021

Dr. Justin L. Barrett is founder and president of Blueprint 1543 and adjunct professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he was formerly director of the Thrive Center and chief project developer for Science, Theology, and Religion Initiatives. His new book is Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing. More»
#557 Stephen Fleming - Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness

Dec 6, 2021

Dr. Stephen Fleming is Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging where he leads the Metacognition Group, at University College London. The question that drives most his research is: what supports the remarkable capacity for human self-awareness? To address this question, he combines experimental and theoretical approaches (psychophysics, computational modelling, neuroimaging) to understand how people become self-aware of aspects of their cognition and behavior (such as perception, memory and decision-making), and why such awareness is often impaired in psychiatric and neurological disorders. Current interests focus on understanding contributions of human prefrontal cortex to metacognition, and how self-awareness and social cognition may share a core neurocomputational basis. He is the author of Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness. More»
#556 Dan Sperber: Culture, Cultural Attraction Theory, Epistemic Vigilance, and Reason

Dec 3, 2021

Dr. Dan Sperber is a researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod, and a professor in cognitive science and philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. He is Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and member of the Academia Europaea. He has been the first laureate of the Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize in 2009. He is the author of numerous articles in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology and of several books, including Meaning and Relevance (with Deirdre Wilson), Relevance: Communication and Cognition (with Deirdre Wilson), and The Enigma of Reason (with Hugo Mercier). More»
#555 Karen Kramer: Life History, Parenting, Population Growth, Dispersals, and Mating Systems

Dec 2, 2021

Dr. Karen Kramer is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. Her research interests span behavioral ecology, demography, comparative life history and reproductive ecology, the evolution of juvenility, cooperative breeding, intergenerational transfers and the interaction between economic and demographic transitions. The question that unifies her research is why do humans have the unparalleled capacity for population growth compared to closely related species? Her field work in a traditional Maya village in the Yucatan, Mexico has focused on documenting and modeling children’s time allocation, juvenile cooperation, intergenerational resource flows, female energetics, and high fertility in a pretransitional population. Her research among the Pumé, a group of South American mobile hunter-gatherers addresses questions about children’s growth, development and reproductive strategies, and the effects that seasonal resource availability has on fertility and child mortality. She also collaborates with conservation biologists and primatologists working in the Madagascar highlands. More»
#554 Felipe De Brigard: Memory, Imagination, and Free Will

Nov 29, 2021

Dr. Felipe De Brigard is Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor at Duke University. Most of his research focuses on the way in which memory and imagination interact. So far, he has explored ways in which episodic memory both guides and constrains episodic counterfactual thinking (i.e., thoughts about alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred), and how this interaction affects the perceived plausibility of imagined counterfactual events. He also explores the differential contribution of episodic and semantic memory in the generation of different kinds of counterfactual simulations, as well as the effect of counterfactual thinking on the memories they derive from. In addition, his research attempts to understand how prior experience helps to constrain the way in which we reconstruct episodic memories. Finally, he is also interested in the role of internal attention during conscious recollection. More»
#553 April Bleske-Rechek: Gender Roles, Division of Labor, Occupation and Educational Choices

Nov 26, 2021

Dr. April Bleske-Rechek is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. As a researcher, she focuses on human mating, friendship, cognitive abilities and intellectual giftedness, and science literacy. More»
#552 Kate Adamala: Synthetic Cells, Cell Evolution, the Origin of Life, and Astrobiology

Nov 25, 2021

Dr. Katarzyna (Kate) P. Adamala is a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Adamala's work includes contributions to the field of astrobiology, synthetic cell engineering, and biocomputing. Her research on prebiotic RNA replication provided an experimental scenario for the RNA world hypothesis of the origin of life. She has worked on constructing liposome bioreactor synthetic cells. She is a founder and steering group member of the Build-a-Cell Initiative, an international collaboration for creation of synthetic live cells. She is a co-founder of synthetic cell company Synlife. Adamala and Szostak demonstrated non enzymatic RNA replication in primitive protocells is only possibly in presence of weak cation chelator like citric acid, providing further evidence for the central role of citric acid in primordial metabolism. More»
#551 Louise Barrett: Baboon Societies, Ecology, Embodied Cognition, and Evolutionary Psychology

Nov 22, 2021

Dr. Louise Barrett is Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution & Behaviour at the University of Lethbridge. She ran a long-term project on baboons in South Africa for twelve years, and currently co-directs the Samara Vervet Monkey Project in South Africa. Her research programme centers on the issue of how ecology shapes patterns of sociality and cognitive evolution, and includes work on thermal physiology and responses to climate change, parental investment strategies, cooperation, sexual conflict, movement ecology, and infant development. She is also interested in how culture and biology intersect to influence human behavior, and runs projects on female reproductive decision-making in Independent Samoa and the Canadian North. She is the author of Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (Princeton University Press). More»
#550 Jonathan Zimmerman - Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn

Nov 19, 2021

Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman is a Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Dr. Zimmerman is one of the foremost education historians working today. His work examines how education practices and policies have developed over time, and the myths that often cloud our understanding of teaching and learning. He has a particular interest in how political and social movements come to shape education. He is the author of several books, including the most recent one, Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn. More»