David Eagleman – Your Creative Brain – Think Again - a Big Think Podcast #122
Bending, breaking, & blending: How humans remake the world. Neuroscientist David Eagleman on creativity.
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Jason Gots: It’s 150,000 years ago. You’re a Homo sapiens, hanging out in a really cozy clearing protected from behind by a cliff wall. It’s a great spot. Temperate, isolated, pretty safe. Lots of good fruits and tubers nearby. Should you just hang out here forever? Well…you could…but something’s nagging at that medial frontal cortex of yours. There’s a hill in the distance. What’s beyond it? Something different, maybe! Something new and shiny! Maybe today you’ll just take a quick look.
My guest today is neuroscientist David Eagleman. In The Runaway Species, How Human Creativity Remakes the World, David and his co-author Anthony Brandt explore that ancient tension between mastery and curiosity - the known and the unknown. And how the human imagination exploits it to make new things.
Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode:
Isaac Lidsky on how going blind showed one man the light, Michael Slaby on a 30-hour work week.
About Think Again - A Big Think Podcast: Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas from creative and curious minds. Since 2015, the Think Again podcast has been taking us out of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and Jason Gots, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from Big Think’s interview archives.
You've got 10 minutes with Einstein. What do you talk about? Black holes? Time travel? Why not gambling? The Art of War? Contemporary parenting? Some of the best conversations happen when we're pushed outside of our comfort zones. Each week on Think Again, we surprise smart people you may have heard of with short clips from Big Think's interview archives on every imaginable subject. These conversations could, and do, go anywhere.
Four Letter You – Merve Emre – Think Again - a Big Think Podcast #163
How a mother-daughter obsession became a massive and dangerous industry. The weird history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
- Find out why Carl Jung turns over in his grave every time someone calls herself an 'introvert' or an 'extravert'!
- Discover how Truman Capote became the subject of psychological experiments on creativity!
Emily Nemens (Editor, The Paris Review): The literary industrial complex
A seismic shake-up at a venerable literary gatekeeper. Shallow and not-so-shallow consumerism. The Paris Review's new editor on old ghosts, new voices, and what's worth keeping.
Daniel McCabe: This seemingly impossible knot
Congo is one of the most culturally diverse, mineral rich, and beautiful places on Earth. But the “heart of darkness" colonizers dreamed into being still bleeds. Daniel McCabe's documentary This is Congo lets this wounded nation speak for itself.
THIS IS CONGO, a new documentary film, attempts to wrap its mind around the incomprehensible realities of the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost 60 years after it was founded. At one point, commenting on one of the more incomprehensible recent events, a high-ranking military officer remarks:
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