AI research endured years of failure and frustration before new techniques in deep learning unleashed the swift, astonishing progress of the last decade. Michael’s recent book A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence explores what we can learn from this history, and examines where we are now and where the field is going. We discuss: Why the Cyc project’s aim to encode ‘all human knowledge’ (!!) into a functioning AI got stuck, despite years of intense effort.  What OpenAI’s GPT-3...

The idea we have ‘innate knowledge’ seems quite wrong to most of us. But we do! And the intuitions leading us astray here also blind us to other aspects of human nature.  We are all ‘blind storytellers’. Professor Iris Berent reveals what misleads us, and what we are missing. 18:55 Newborns have basic knowledge of the nature of objects. Eye-tracking experiments reveal that they have a grasp of the 3 c’s - cohesion, contact and continuity.  22:35 How do you get expectations about the nature...

Vision is the best understood sensory domain. But smell is turning out to be wonderfully strange and even more complex than sight. Dr Ann-Sophie Barwich joins me to explore ideas from her recent book Smellosophy. How is vomit related to parmesan cheese? Why do things smell so different depending on context? And what does smell teach us about the very nature of perception?  We explore: Why the ‘promiscuity’ of smell doesn’t make it merely subjective. Smells can have a multitude of...

Despite multi-million dollar research programmes and impressive technical progress, neuroscience still can’t explain basic systems - like a maggot’s tiny brain or the grinding of a lobster’s stomach. Professor Matthew Cobb joins me to discuss the intellectual history of neuroscience,  his frank assessment of where we’re at, and how we can make progress. We cover: How the idea of the brain as computer got started in the mid-C20th, and why it’s probably wrong. (10:53) The challenge of the...

Could depression be caused by inflammation?  Cambridge psychiatrist Edward Bullmore makes the case for his radical new theory, from his bestselling book The Inflamed Mind.

Keith Frankish busts the myth of qualia, and teaches me how to escape Cartesian Gravity.

Celebrated neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains how we became clever, conscious and emotional after 4 billion years of evolution.

Churchland is the queen of neurophilosophy. She’s on fine form in this interview - charming, funny and occasionally savage as we range over her views on the nature of philosophy, the neuroscience and evolution of morality, and consider what’s wrong with the two major ethical traditions in western thought: utilitarianism and Kantianism. 

Do men and women have different brains? Jordan Peterson and the Google memo guy are pretty sure they do. Professor Gina Rippon disagrees. Biology, she argues, is not destiny and evidence of differences has been drastically overstated. Who’s right? On the eve of the publication of her book The Gendered Brain, hear Gina make her case, and respond to her critics.

This episode features a neurologist with some striking tales to tell about who we become when our brains start to break. What happens when memories are gradually destroyed by Alzheimers, when our personality is drastically transformed by dementia, or when a sudden surge of creativity is unleashed by Parkinson’s medication?

Dr Kevin Mitchell's recent book INNATE sets out to show ‘How The Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are’. We discuss his views on the latest research into the biological underpinnings of intelligence, gender, sexuality, and psychiatric disorders.

Raymond Tallis could be described as a medical doctor who thinks we transcend our biology, or as a neuroscientist who thinks there is much more to us than our brains. Core to his outlook is the claim the human consciousness is utterly unique in ways that can’t be reduced to brains and biology. We discuss his ideas about free will, why Benjamin Libet's experiments were no good, why minds are not computers, what is special about shared intentionality and our sense of the past and the future.

Dr Lucy Johnstone is a controversial mental health professional who thinks that psychiatry, as currently practised, is bad for us. We discuss why Lucy thinks diagnosis in psychiatry is wrong and dangerous, her objections to the use of psychiatric drugs and her deep misgivings about the biomedical model in general. Lucy's new initiative - the Power Threat Meaning Framework - is the basis for a radically different approach to mental health and the culmination of her life’s work.

Panpsychism can seem like a bonkers theory of consciousness, but according to Philip Goff and a growing chorus of leading thinkers - from philosophers to neuroscientists - it might just be right… In this episode we hear why Philip champions panpsychism as 'the worst solution to the problem of consciousness - apart from all the others.' We cover Russell and Eddington, Galileo's error, why neuroscience can't explain the taste of Marmite and hear about Philip's proudest moment in philosophy...