Anxiety. It is the only emotion my body believes is truly necessary for me to experience at three o’clock in the morning. To be sure I’d rather be sleeping. Usually how I respond to this experience is by listening to audiobooks or podcasts until I fall back asleep. I may get through more audiobooks that way, but it’s hard for me to look at that and imagine anxiety as anything other than a burden. I’ve recently been rethinking that relationship with anxiety. And in particular, one book has...

My episode last week featured a conversation with author David McCraney about what it takes to change someone’s mind on a big, important topic like religion, or abortion, or guns. And the overriding conclusion of McRaney’s research on the topic was that facts alone don’t change minds. From emotions and feelings to social dynamics, beliefs are embedded in a complex web of factors that rationality alone can do little to unwind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. My guest this week is a two...

I often say that the second best thing to happen to me was deciding to become a Christian. And the first best thing was deciding not to be a Christian. I didn’t exactly grow up Christian, but I became a believer around age 12. I went to Christian school. Overall I took my religious beliefs really seriously. And to me, they felt like my own. A core part of my identity as a Christian was that I was explicit about my beliefs. I didn’t inherit them from my parents, nor did they feel like I was...

Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books,...

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Stephen Kosslyn is a foundational figure in the field of cognitive science. It is only fitting that he is the final guest in my Cognitive Revolution interview series, before I transition into a new line of content which I’m calling...

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Tom Griffiths is Professor Psychology and Computation Science at Princeton University, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Tom uses algorithms from AI to inform his work as a psychologist—testing the ways in which...

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Leyla Isik is Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She did her PhD at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher and Tommy Poggio. Leyla’s research uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroimaging and...

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Antonio Damasio is an eminent neuroscientist and author. Damasio is originally from Portugal. He is the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at USC. His books include...

This season's theme: leaning into more complicated narratives. Featuring — Jonathan Franzen, Cixin Liu, Rachel Cusk, Salley Rooney, Adam Grant, David Szalay, Joseph Conrad, Amor Towles, Aaron Sorkin, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jack Reacher. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Tom is the progenitor of intergroup contact theory in social psychology. In this episode, we talk about where the ideas behind that theory came from. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

Charles Duhigg says that habits will take you to the next level. But he isn't telling you the whole story. This is Exhibit A in the case against habit. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

I'm making some changes to the platform. The podcast is no longer Cognitive Revolution. I'm calling it: Against Habit. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is Alan Fiske. Alan is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, who is known for his unique brand of mixing approaches from psychology and anthropology. He is the brother of Susan Fiske, a famous social psychologist and one of my first guests on this show. In this episode, we talk about growing up in an academic family, Alan joining the peace core to avoid the Vietnam draft, helping to eradicate smallpox in Congo, how travel and experiences abroad influenced decision to become...

My guest this week is Elizabeth Loftus. She is generally considered to be the most highly cited female psychologist of all time. She is also a controversial figure within the field. Her research has looked at the unreliability of eye witness metaphor and the nature of false memories. She’s used this compelling line of research to testify as an expert witness in court. Though she’s testified on behalf of a range of defendants, the most publicized cases she’s participated in have been...

This week’s guest is George Lakoff. George is one of the most highly cited cognitive scientists of all time, with his book Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with Mark Johnson) having been referenced in over 75,000 other papers. George is best known for his work on how metaphor provides the structure of cognition, generally known as the “conceptual metaphors” framework, as well as his foundational ideas about the embodied mind. In last week's episode, I talked with Annie Murphy Paul about her...

My guest today is Annie Murphy Paul. Annie is a science journalist, and she has a new book out. It’s getting a lot of press. She’s made the rounds on all the Big Idea podcasts. I listened to a bunch of them in prep for this episode. Three of my favorites were her talks with Adam Grant, Ezra Klein, and Scott Barry Kaufman (fun fact: AMP was actually SBK's very first guest on his podcast). They’re all great discussions, and so I tried to broach some new territory with Annie in our talk...

This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have a for a long time. I met Kevin several years ago, and it was a big moment for me. This was the first time I’d ever met a real author. Of course I said something foolish. Of course he has no recollection of such foolish statements. I’m a huge admirer of his first book, The Most Dangerous Book, which tells the story behind Ulysses—one of the most controversial manuscripts of all time. It’s got an incredible cast of characters from James Joyce to...

This week I’m officially announcing premium subscriptions, available through my Substack. Thanks to those of you who have already purchased one. Your support means a lot! I’m playing around with different pricing and discounts schemes, but the main one I’m offering to kick off premium subscriptions is one year for $29.50. With this paid subscription, you get access to two additional series. In Re-Viewed, I revisit the works—books, podcasts, movies, TV shows, etc—that have made the biggest...

Oh, Steve. What a guy. For better or worse, this is one of the most listened to episodes of my show. It’s the one people often gravity to when they’re first checking out the show. So I wanted to come back to it a couple years after the fact to see what I made of it. It was recorded at a weird time for me, preceding a big dip in my mental health during the pandemic. In this episode of Redux, I give my personal theories of Steven Pinker: how his mind works, why he’s as successful as he is, the...

The second episode I published for Cognitive Revolution was #2: Paul Bloom on Picking the Perfect Title. He was a big early get for me, and Paul Bloom is still one of the more famous authors I’ve had on the show. So I thought this would be the perfect choice for the first installment of my new series: Cog Rev Redux. Recently I’ve been asking myself a series of questions: What exactly have I gotten out of the interviews I do? What from them really sticks with me? How have they changed my...

My guest today is someone very special. I worked in his lab for two years, and he did a lot to form my relationship with cognitive science. It started back when I was an undergrad, and I went to the Cognitive Science Society conference in Berlin. There was this professor there, and I was totally arrested by his approach to studying the mind. He was using sophisticated computational models informed by AI to understand the cognitive processes underlying human thought. His name was Josh...

This is the second part of my conversation with Randy Gallistel. In the first part, we talk about his ideas around why the neuroscience of memory is completely inadequate to the task of understanding… memory. In this episode, we get into the backstory on those ideas, as well as Randy’s major influences. We talk about the influence of foundational experiments by Tony Deutsch, why neuroscientists “squirm” when you bring up the problem of representation, which of Randy’s research projects didn't...

Randy Gallistel has made a career (at least partly) out of making the neuroscientific community angry. He’s made broad, sweeping claims that cut to the core of the neuroscience of learning and memory. The problem with his claims is not that they’re broad and sweeping. The problem is that they might be right. In particular, he’s taking aim at neuroscience for not grappling with the symbolic nature of cognition. The neuroscience of memory, he argues, doesn’t even acknowledge the basis existence...

Philip Johnson-Laird is professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is one of the most influential cognitive scientists of all time, best known for developing the idea of “mental models.” Though if you really want to get a sense of how eminent he is, you have to look no further than his email address. You can find him at Phil at Princeton. That’s right. He is the Phil at Princeton University. It was a huge honor to talk to him for this conversation, as he’s long been one of my favorite...