Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black hol

Episodes

Total: 372

The germ theory of disease is a crowning achievement of science, up there with modern physics, conti

Questions about consciousness range from the precise and empirical -- what neurons fire when I have

Welcome to the April 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded

Cosmologists were, let us be honest, pretty stunned in 1998 when observations revealed that the

Consciousness is easier to possess than to define. One thing we can do is to look into the brain and

We often study cognition in other species, in part to learn about modes of thinking that are differe

Welcome to the March 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded

A lot of science goes into crafting the perfect cocktail. Balancing sweet and bitter notes, providin

It is commonplace to refer to the Earth's oceans as vast and largely unexplored. But we do understan

Political outcomes would be relatively simple to predict and understand if only people were well-inf

The Trump administration, led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, has proposed

It is a feature of many human activities - sports, cooking, music, interpersonal relations - that be

Welcome to the February 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are fund

A typical human lifespan is approximately three billion heartbeats in duration. Lasting that long re

Randomness plays an important role in the evolution of life (as my evil twin will tell you

Big data is ruling, or at least deeply infiltrating, all of modern existence. Unprecedented capacity

A new year, and a new centennial -- 300 (regularly-numbered) episodes of Mindscape! Our tradition is

It's the end of the year, and time for our annual holiday break here at Mindscape. But as usual, we

Living organisms seem exquisitely organized and complex, with features clearly adapted to serving ce

The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galax