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 transcribedIt's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children's physical and mental characteristics...
Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones a...
How human beings behave is, for fairly evident reasons, a topic of intense interest to human beings. And yet, not only is there much we don't understa...
Physics is extremely good at describing simple systems with relatively few moving parts. Sadly, the world is not like that; many phenomena of interest...
There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It's therefore interesting to see how our...
Economies in the modern world are incredibly complex systems. But when we sit down to think about them in quantitative ways, it's natural to keep thin...
Plato and Aristotle founded much of what we think of as Western philosophy during the fourth and fifth centuries BCE. Interestingly, that historical p...
Welcome to the August 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones aski...
Neuroscience has given us great insights into how our brains work. But there is still room for purely humanistic disciplines to help us think through...
The arrow of time — all the ways in which the past differs from the future — is a fascinating subject because it connects everyday phenomena (memory,...
Natural selection has done a pretty good job at creating a wide variety of living species, but we humans can't help but wonder whether we could do bet...
How can data be biased? Isn't it supposed to be an objective reflection of the real world? We all know that these are somewhat naive rhetorical questi...
It's not easy, figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. It's even harder when your chosen methodology is to essentially start from scratch, posit...
Welcome to the July 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably...
Depending on who you listen to, quantum computers are either the biggest technological change coming down the road or just another overhyped bubble. T...
It's all well and good to talk abstractly about morality and justice, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out what to do about people wh...
Any system in which politicians represent geographical districts with boundaries chosen by the politicians themselves is vulnerable to gerrymandering:...
Welcome to the June 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking...
You observe a phenomenon, and come up with an explanation for it. That's true for scientists, but also for literally every person. (Why won't my car s...
