Inquiry Podcasts

For hundreds of years, there have been conspiracy theories that have suggested that a small group of powerful men in secret societies have run the governments of the world for their own benefits. Most of these conspiracy theories are grandiose, unwieldy and unfalsifiable.

Tonight, Inquiry welcomes back JEFFREY BENNETT. He served as the first director of the Program in Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Sills at the University of Colorado. He holds a PhD in astrophysics and is the author of several books.

All of us feel like we have a unified consciousness, a “self” that acts with a purpose that resides  inside the head of this biological machine of our body. It is that little person inside our heads that makes us who we are. But recent startling findings in the neurosciences tell a very different story. Our brains function as a collection of decentralized complex systems and disunited processes that are integrated much like the programs on our PC. So how come we feel so single minded? Our very special guest tonight is DR. MICHAEL S. GAZZANIGA, Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind; President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute and Founding Director of the MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Project. His new book WHO’S IN CHARGE? FREE WILL AND THE SCIENCE OF THE BRAIN is a wonderful review of the latest findings of neurology and details what these studies tell us about where the “I” is located physically in the brain and what consciousness may be.