Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

The theory of "embodied cognition" posits that it's better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a whole, not just in the cells of the brain. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh is a psychologist and neuroscientist who uses imaging technologies to study how different parts of the brain and body are involved in different cognitive tasks. We talk about mirror neurons, those brain cells that light up both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see someone else performing the action.

Human activity is causing enormous changes on our planet's environment, but perhaps there is the prospect of a new equilibrium, if we can manage to ameliorate our most destructive impulses. Wildlife conservationist Joe Walston argues that increasing urbanization provides hope for biodiversity preservation and poverty alleviation moving forward. We discuss these trends, the causes underlying them, and what strategies suggest themselves to bring humans into balance with the environment.

Philosopher Alex Rosenberg's new book How History Gets Things Wrong claims that we should not trust the causal stories we tell ourselves abut history. It's not that we get the facts wrong, it's that we have wrong ideas about causality and how the human mind works, and we can't help but import these wrong ideas to our beliefs about history. Alex and I dig into how this claim arises naturally from a certain way that naturalists should think about the world.

Scott Derrickson is the director and co-writer of Marvel's Doctor Strange. Scott was gracious enough to take time from a very busy schedule to sit down for a chat about a wide number of topics. We go in some detail through the immensely complicated process of taking a modern blockbuster movie from pitch to screen. We move on to discussing why certain genres seem universal, before tackling even bigger issues about worldviews and how they affect one's life and work.

Tyler Cowen will be well-known to many listeners for his long-running blog Marginal Revolution and his many books and articles. Here he offers a surprising new take on how society should arrange itself, based on the simple idea that the welfare of future generations counts for just as much as the welfare of the current one. Tyler concludes that the most moral thing for us to do is to work to maximize economic growth right now, as that's the best way to ensure that future generations are well-off.

String theory is a speculative and technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. To get to the bottom of why anyone would think that replacing particles with little loops of string was a promising way forward for theoretical physics, I spoke with expert string theorist Clifford Johnson. We talk about the road string theory has taken from a tentative proposal dealing with the strong interaction, to the point it's at today.

Annalee Newitz has carved out a unique career as a writer and thinker, founding the visionary blog io9 and publishing nonfiction in a number of formats, and is now putting her imagination to work in the realm of fiction. We talk about how science fiction needs more economics, how much of human behavior comes down to dealing with our neuroses, and what it's like to make the transition from writing non-fiction to fiction.

Aging — everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundworm, with an eye to extending its lifespan as well as figuring out exactly what processes take place when we age. In this episode we contemplate what scientists have learned about aging, and the prospects for ameliorating its effects — or curing it altogether? — even in human beings.

Language manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other hand, it also conveys meaning. How do words and meaning come together in the brain? David Poeppel is a leading neuroscientist who works in many areas, with a focus on the relationship between language and thought. We talk about cutting-edge ideas in the science and philosophy of language, and how researchers have just recently climbed out from under a nineteenth-century paradigm for understanding how all this works.

To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. With the ongoing revolutions in biology, we can’t avoid facing up to some difficult should-questions. Alta Charo is a world expert in a gamut of these issues, working as a law professor and government official specializing in bioethics. We hit all the big questions: designer babies, birth control, abortion, religious exemptions, stem cells, end of life care, and more.

For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. Technology is changing what money is and how we use it, and Neha Narula is a leader in thinking about where money is going. One much-hyped aspect is the advent of blockchain technology, which has led to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We talk about what the blockchain really is, how it enables new kinds of currency, and from a wider perspective whether it can help restore a more individualistic, decentralized Web.

Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. Nobody embodies the scope of modern jazz better than Wynton Marsalis. As a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, educator, and ambassador for the music, he has worked tirelessly to keep jazz vibrant and alive. In this bouncy conversation, we talk about various kinds of music, how they might relate to physics, and some of the greater challenges facing the United States today.

Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a planet. No person deserves more credit/blame for forcing the astronomical community's hand than Caltech astronomer Michael Brown. Now Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin have found indirect evidence that there is another real planet far beyond Pluto's orbit -- which they have dubbed Planet Nine.

There is a tendency to not face up to the reality of death, and the Death Positive movement aims to change that. One of the leaders in this movement is today's guest, Megan Rosenbloom, who works as a medical librarian by day. We talk about attitudes toward death around the world, the differences between dying at home and in a hospital, the importance of autonomy in old age, and how individuals and societies can cope with the ultimate inevitability that comes with being alive.

Today's show is something different: a solo effort, featuring just me talking without any guests to cramp my style. This won't be the usual format, but I suspect it will happen from time to time. Feel free to chime in below on how often you think alternative formats should be part of the mix. The topic today is "Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?", or equivalently "Why Does the Universe Exist at All?" Heady stuff, but we're not going to back away from the challenge.