Category: View from Giants’ shoulder

How do we understand the world? The brain receives a constant stream of input from our sensors and from this creates a model of the world. What we perceive, our thoughts and experiences, are based on the brain’s model. Unfortunately, the model of the world in our head...

eople have believed in things unseen since the beginning of time, and in many cases, they have endured ridicule and much worse. In the middle ages, thousands of women were burned at the stake for allegedly engaging in witchcraft, which was considered a superstition in Christian Europe. Being...

It may seem a big claim, but knowing how to think clearly and critically has literally helped save the world. In September 1983, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s early warning system showed five US missiles heading towards the country. Stanislaw Petrov knew his...

Andy Norman is an award-winning author and public philosopher who has done extensive research on the evolutionary origins of human reasoning and the norms that make dialogue fruitful. He finds his studies of how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding a particularly relevant topic in today’s world....

Critically-acclaimed author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and world-renowned theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss discuss biology, cosmology, religion, and a host of other topics at this event entitled ‘Something for Nothing’. This video was recorded at The Australian National University on 10 April 2012.

In this episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Andy Norman, an award-winning author, public philosopher, and prominent advocate for the field of “cognitive immunology,” which studies the mind’s resistance to bad ideas. In this conversation you will learn how mental immunity works, how epidemics of irrationality...