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 earth video games are designed? Then you've come to the right place. Each week, Sean Carroll will host conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. From neuroscientists and engineers to authors and television producers, Sean and his guests talk about the biggest ideas in science, philosophy, culture and much more.
412 episodes transcribedPeter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a leading...
We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don't come very close to really understanding what...
Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones...
There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory...
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e...
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by ju...
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some num...
Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones...
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncer...
It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and indi...
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 to cl...
Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures w...
"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 pretty unive...
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 matter, and...
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by...
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 a full so...
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones as...
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hy...
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potent...
