NOUS
15 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 27 ratingsNOUS tackles the deepest questions about the mind, through conversations with leading thinkers working in philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry and beyond. Each episode features an in-depth conversation focussing on one big idea.
How does the brain produce consciousness? Are mental illnesses just biological? Are there limits to the power of neuroscience - or will it eventually unravel the mysteries of free will and morality?
Hosted by Ilan Goodman
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Episodes
Michael Wooldridge on the History and Future of AI
May 12, 2021 10:07 - 55 minutes - 65.8 MBAI research endured years of failure and frustration before new techniques in deep learning unleashed the swift, astonishing progress of the last decade. Michael’s recent book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence explores what we can learn from this history, and examines where we are now and where the field is going. We discuss: Why the Cyc project’s aim to encode ‘all human knowledge’ (!!) into a functioning AI got stuck, despite years of intense effort. What OpenAI’s GPT-3 la...
Iris Berent on Innate Knowledge and Why We Are Blind to Ourselves
January 28, 2021 06:00 - 1 hour - 128 MBThe idea we have ‘innate knowledge’ seems quite wrong to most of us. But we do! And the intuitions leading us astray here also blind us to other aspects of human nature. We are all ‘blind storytellers’. Professor Iris Berent reveals what misleads us, and what we are missing. 18:55 Newborns have basic knowledge of the nature of objects. Eye-tracking experiments reveal that they have a grasp of the 3 c’s - cohesion, contact and continuity. 22:35 How do you get expectations about the na...
Ann-Sophie Barwich on the Surprising Neuroscience of Smell
December 20, 2020 18:33 - 49 minutes - 91.9 MBVision is the best understood sensory domain. But smell is turning out to be wonderfully strange and even more complex than sight. Dr Ann-Sophie Barwich joins me to explore ideas from her recent book Smellosophy. How is vomit related to parmesan cheese? Why do things smell so different depending on context? And what does smell teach us about the very nature of perception? We explore: Why the ‘promiscuity’ of smell doesn’t make it merely subjective. Smells can have a multitude of qualit...
Matthew Cobb - Why Neuroscience Still Can’t Explain Much
November 22, 2020 19:50 - 1 hour - 90.4 MBDespite multi-million dollar research programmes and impressive technical progress, neuroscience still can’t explain basic systems - like a maggot’s tiny brain or the grinding of a lobster’s stomach. Professor Matthew Cobb joins me to discuss the intellectual history of neuroscience, his frank assessment of where we’re at, and how we can make progress. We cover: How the idea of the brain as computer got started in the mid-C20th, and why it’s probably wrong. (10:53) The challenge of t...
Edward Bullmore on the ‘inflamed mind’ theory of depression
January 30, 2020 22:27 - 56 minutes - 79.5 MBCould depression be caused by inflammation? Cambridge psychiatrist Ed Bullmore makes the case for his radical new theory, from his bestselling book The Inflamed Mind. Here's the breakdown... 6:12 There’s a Cartesian divide in the way we practice medicine. Professor Bullmore argues that we need to find more integrated ways of treating body and mind. 8:52 The case of Mrs P who was suffering from arthritis and depression. But what was causing what? 12:31 Is this theory a biomedical or...
Keith Frankish Exposes the Illusion of Consciousness
December 01, 2019 22:55 - 1 hour - 102 MB‘Qualia’, the subjective qualities of experience, are the bedrock of some theories of consciousness - but they are a fiction according to my guest in this episode. With great charm and passion, Keith Frankish makes the case for ‘illusionism’. 0:54 We kick off chatting about Keith’s humorous definition of a philosopher as ‘an expert in everything and nothing.’ That leads us to Wilfrid Sellar’s famous description of the aim of philosophy: “to understand how things, in the broadest possible s...
Joseph LeDoux on the 4 Billion Year Journey to Our Conscious Selves
October 27, 2019 21:09 - 1 hour - 87.3 MBJoseph LeDoux is a celebrated neuroscientist whose latest book is a work of quite staggering ambition - it traces the ‘Four Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains’. He reveals the profound similarities between us and bacteria, as well as offering a brilliant, overarching account of what makes us unique in the animal kingdom; how we developed the capacity for emotion and self-consciousness. 2:27 LeDoux describes his career path – from a small town in Louisiana, via business a...
Patricia Churchland on How We Evolved A Conscience
September 15, 2019 20:55 - 1 hour - 85.3 MBPatricia Churchland is the queen of neurophilosophy. She’s on fine form in this interview - charming, funny and occasionally savage as we range over her views on the nature of philosophy, the neuroscience and evolution of morality, and consider what’s wrong with the two major ethical traditions in western thought: utilitarianism and Kantianism. 1.43 - Is philosophy just a kind of science in its infancy - a ‘proto-science’ - or it is a special kind of conceptual analysis? Professor Churchl...
Gina Rippon on the Myth of the Gendered Brain
March 15, 2019 14:13 - 1 hour - 94.1 MBDo men and women have different brains? Jordan Peterson and the Google memo guy are pretty sure they do. Different chromosomes, different hormones = different brains. Right? Professor Gina Rippon disagrees. Biology, she argues, is not destiny and evidence of differences has been drastically overstated. For her efforts she has been called a ‘science denier’ & her ideas dismissed as politically correct nonsense. But in her book, The Gendered Brain, I found a careful assessment of evidence...
Are psychiatric conditions really biological? A psychologist and a neurogeneticist offer conflicting views
February 27, 2019 16:42Are psychiatric conditions really biological? Or should they be understood as fundamentally psychological problems with social causes? It’s a vexed topic which got very different responses from two of my guests on NOUS. The clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone is well-known as a savage critic of mainstream psychiatry. In our interview, she argued that so-called ‘diagnoses’ like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are totally invalid categories which should not be seen as biologi...
Jules Montague on Dementia, Memory and Identity
February 12, 2019 17:43 - 56 minutes - 79 MBThis episode features a neurologist with some striking tales to tell about who we become when our brains start to break. What happens when memories are gradually destroyed by Alzheimer's, when our personality is drastically transformed by dementia, or when a sudden surge of creativity is unleashed by Parkinson’s medication? Dr Jules Montague’s new book Lost and Found integrates moving stories of her own patients with philosophical ideas about personal identity. The result is a fascinating ...
Kevin Mitchell on How The Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are
January 29, 2019 16:48 - 1 hour - 84.7 MBMy guest in this episode is a neurogeneticist who is unafraid to tackle some of the most politically charged questions in science. Dr Kevin Mitchell is an associate professor at the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. His recent book INNATE sets out to show ‘How The Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are’, and in it he offers his take on the latest research into the biological underpinnings of intelligence, gender, sexuality, and psychiatric disorders. We start off discus...
Raymond Tallis on the Uniqueness of Human Consciousness
December 16, 2018 18:09 - 55 minutes - 52.9 MBMy guest in this episode could be described as a medical doctor who thinks we transcend our biology, or as a neuroscientist who thinks there is much more to us than our brains. Raymond Tallis spent many years as an NHS consultant and Professor of Geriatric Medicine, specialising in the neuroscience of strokes and epilepsy. He is also a prolific thinker, having published more than 20 substantial works of philosophy. Core to his outlook is the claim the human consciousness is utterly uniqu...
Lucy Johnstone Against Psychiatric Diagnosis
December 11, 2018 17:20 - 1 hour - 63.2 MBIn this episode I meet a controversial clinical psychologist who thinks that mainstream mental health services are bad for us. Dr Lucy Johnstone has worked for many years on the frontline of adult mental health services - helping those who may have been diagnosed with conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or clinical depression. It's a staggering fact that roughly a quarter of British adults have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder at some point in their lives. But Dr John...
Philip Goff on why consciousness may be fundamental to reality
December 10, 2018 21:20 - 55 minutes - 53 MBPanpsychism can seem like a bonkers theory of consciousness, but according to Philip Goff and a growing chorus of leading thinkers - from philosophers to neuroscientists - it might just be right… In this episode we discuss why Philip rates panpsychism as 'the worst solution to the problem of consciousness - apart from all the others.' We explore his dramatic claim that Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington did for consciousness science what Darwin did for the science of life, how 'Galile...