Humans are the only Earthlings with complex language. But at what cost was that ability acquired? In this episode, I visit Tetsuro Matsuzawa to learn about his influential cognitive tradeoff hypothesis. Available with YouTube Premium – https://www.youtube.com/premium/originals. To see if Premium is available in your country, click here: https://goo.gl/A3HtfP
There are 100 billion individual neurons in the human brain. Working together, they allow us to make sense of, and move through, the world around us. Scientists have built replicas of the human brain with computers, but no one has ever successfully made a brain out of humans. On this […]
Normal people can become monsters given the right situation. That’s the standard narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time. But what if the cause of its participants’ cruel behavior wasn’t what we’ve always been told?
If I could live forever, should I? How does being reminded of our own mortality affect us psychologically? In this episode I speak with mortician and death positivity activist Caitlin Doughty and visit a cryonics facility trying to extend human life indefinitely. Will I take them up on their offer, […]
Are we alone in the universe? Even if we could contact aliens, what would we say? How would we say it? And, most importantly, should we even be trying to make contact at all? This episode takes me on a journey to compose and send my own personal message into […]
How can a lie become true? In this episode, Dr. Aaron Blaisdell and I create a game show that is actually a giant “human Skinner Box” to observe the formation of superstitious beliefs. And Dr. Samuel Veissière helps me design and perform a placebo reverse exorcism, harnessing the power of […]
To celebrate, I asked a group of colleagues who worked with me on the series to sit down at Vsauce HQ and watch through three entire episodes. We go behind the scenes, elaborate on topics in the episodes, and dig in to what impact working on Mind Field has had […]
Everyone is scared of something … but what’s the SCARIEST thing? Is it even possible to answer such a question? In this special I explore the dark recesses of the mind to learn how fears are born and whether there exists a grand, unifying terror. FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/tweetsauce […]
