What would it take to make you do something truly awful? One day, psychology professor David Buss headed to a friend's house for a party. But when he arrived, his friend--a mild-mannered fellow professor--wasn't there to greet him. As David explains to producer Pat Walters, his friend was upstairs in ...
Cruelty, violence, badness... This episode of Radiolab, we wrestle with the dark side of human nature, and ask whether it's something we can ever really understand, or fully escape.
In this short, Jonathan Schooler tells us about a discovery that launched his career and led to a puzzle that has haunted him ever since.
In this episode, stories of unlikely (and surprisingly simple) answers to seemingly unsolvable problems.
Fate may not be written in the stars, but what if it’s written in our genes? First, Paul Auster raises the specter of "rhyming events," his term for those spooky coincidences that seem more than ordinary mathematical flukes.
Then, a seemingly simple experiment devised by Walter Mischel ...
In this podcast, Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought and the voice in your head. How did it get there? And what's happening when people hear someone else's voice in their head?
In the late 1970s, a new language was born. And Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology at Barnard, has spent the last 30 years helping to decode it. In 1978, 50 deaf children entered a newly formed school--a school in which the teachers (who didn't sign) taught in Spanish. No ...
Susan Schaller believes that the best idea she ever had in her life had to do with an isolated young man she met one day at a community college. He was 27-years-old at the time, and though he had been born deaf, no one had ever taught him to sign. ...
One morning, neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor woke up with a headache. A blood vessel then burst inside her left hemisphere, and silenced all the brain chatter in her head. She was left with no language. No memories. Just sensory intake, and an all-encompassing feeling of joy.
Robert and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success.
Can you ever really know those most beloved to you? Are you sure? Jad wonders how his tiny son experiences the world. Developmental psychologist Dr. Charles Fernyhough explains what science conjectures about what the world is like for a newborn...and shatters Jad's warm fuzzies. But how can ...
How well can you ever really know the people around you? This hour of Radiolab: a disorder that turns family members into impostors, and a scientific take on newborns that challenges Jad's warm fuzzies.
Lulu Miller talks to a nursing home in Düsseldorf, Germany that came up with a novel approach to caring for Alzheimer's and Dementia patients.
A rare and haunting disorder called Capgras turns loved ones into imposters--and reveals that recognizing people, even the people we know the best, is more about how they make us feel than what we see in front of our eyes.
Producer Soren Wheeler brings us a story about a friendship between Steve Strogatz and his high school math teacher, Don Joffray. Steve explains how numbers can connect you and where they fall short.
In "25 Minutes to Go," Johnny Cash counts down the minutes to his hanging. This precipitates an argument between Robert and Jad about whether you could live without numbers. Jad introduces his newborn son, Amil, and insists that he has no concept of numbers whatsoever. Like father, like son? Producer ...
Robert ambushes Jad with a question we've all been dying to ask him since he became a father. And we revisit some other ideas from our Morality show to think about a few really big modern-day problems (think global warming and nuclear war).
John Horgan examines how Americans seem to have a completely different attitude toward war than we did thirty years ago. He takes us on a stroll through Hoboken, asking strangers one of the great unanswerable questions: "Will humans ever stop fighting wars?" Strangely, everyone seems to know the answer. ...
When executive producer Ellen Horne was expecting a baby, she really had no particular intention of becoming a self-made expert on a parasite named Toxoplasma Gondii. Robert Sapolsky explains to us why Ellen had reason to worry when she was scratched by her cat, and he traces the unlikely ...
