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 language-generating AI system really knows about making an omelette.   Why the next generation of AI s ..read more

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 of the world coded into genes? Do genes somehow give rise to computational ‘rules’ in the brain ..read more

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 qualities or notes depending on the context and depending on the individual. But this variability has a funct ..read more

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 Grandmother Cell - and why some neurons selectively respond to Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry! (21:0 ..read more

Could depression be caused by inflammation?  Cambridge psychiatrist Ed Bullmore makes the case for his radical new theory, from his bestselling book The Inflamed Mind. Here's the breakdown... 6:12 There’s a Cartesian divide in the way we practice medicine.  Professor Bullmore argues that we need to find more integrated ways of treating body and mind. 8:52 The case of Mrs P who was suffering from arthritis and depression. But what was causing what? 12:31 Is this theory a biomedical or psychosocial approach to depression? Professor Bullmore argues that it can bridge the two ..read more

‘Qualia’, the subjective qualities of experience, are the bedrock of some theories of consciousness - but they are a fiction according to my guest in this episode. With great charm and passion, Keith Frankish makes the case for ‘illusionism’. 0:54 We kick off chatting about Keith’s humorous definition of a philosopher as ‘an expert in everything and nothing.’ That leads us to Wilfrid Sellar’s famous description of the aim of philosophy: “to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.” 4:36 Keith argues that the s ..read more

Joseph LeDoux is a celebrated neuroscientist whose latest book is a work of quite staggering ambition - it traces the ‘Four Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains’. He reveals the profound similarities between us and bacteria, as well as offering a brilliant, overarching account of what makes us unique in the animal kingdom; how we developed the capacity for emotion and self-consciousness.   2:27 LeDoux describes his career path – from a small town in Louisiana, via business administration to the legendary studies on split-brain patients he undertook with Michael Gazzaniga. &nb ..read more

Patricia 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.  1.43 - Is philosophy just a kind of science in its infancy - a ‘proto-science’ - or it is a special kind of conceptual analysis? Professor Churchland doesn’t pull her punches as she takes on the ‘language police’ approach to philosophy. 8.03 Why s ..read more

Do men and women have different brains? Jordan Peterson and the Google memo guy are pretty sure they do. Different chromosomes, different hormones = different brains. Right? Professor Gina Rippon disagrees. Biology, she argues, is not destiny and evidence of differences has been drastically overstated. For her efforts she has been called a ‘science denier’ & her ideas dismissed as politically correct nonsense. But in her book, The Gendered Brain, I found a careful assessment of evidence, and a powerful case for the immense plasticity of the brain in response to the social environment. Who ..read more

Are psychiatric conditions really biological? Or should they be understood as fundamentally psychological problems with social causes? It’s a vexed topic which got very different responses from two of my guests on NOUS. The clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone is well-known as a savage critic of mainstream psychiatry. In our interview, she argued that so-called ‘diagnoses’ like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are totally invalid categories which should not be seen as biological in any meaningful sense. For her, psychiatry is in the dubious business of labelling common ..read more