BS 182 Iris Berent author of "The Blind Storyteller"
Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD: Neuroscience for Everyone
Ginger Campbell, MD
4.8 • 896 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2021
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This month's episode of Brain Science features Iris Berent, author of "The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature." We explore how our deeply entrenched biases toward dualism and essentialism impact our attitudes toward neuroscience and toward problems like mental illness.
Links and References:
- The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature by Iris Berent
- A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves by Robert Burton
- In BS 96 Dr. Burton raised similar issues to those mentioned in this episode
- Iris Berent at Northeastern University: publications
- Please visit http://brainsciencepodcast.com for additonal references and episode transcripts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Knowing ourselves is difficult, right? This is the hardest thing to do and I hope that this discussion gives us more concrete evidence as to why that's the case, why knowing ourselves is so difficult, it's not insurmountable and perhaps this is something that is important to emphasize. |
| 0:18.0 | So yes, we have dualism and yes we have essentialism and yes they whisper this crazy mantras in our ears |
| 0:26.3 | but then we have reasoning and we have personalities and we have tools to counteract them and the hope is that by understanding our biases we should be able to better |
| 0:35.3 | understand ourselves. |
| 0:37.0 | Welcome to Brain Science, a podcast where we explore how discoveries in |
| 0:45.1 | neuroscience are helping unravel the mystery of how our brain makes us human. |
| 0:50.3 | I'm your host Dr. Ginger Campbell and this is episode 182. If you're curious |
| 0:56.0 | about how your brain really works, this is the podcast for you. This month's |
| 1:00.9 | guest is Dr. Iris Barrett from Northeastern University, and we will be talking about her new book, The Blind Storyteller, how we reason about human nature. |
| 1:13.3 | As you might have guessed by the excerpt that opened this episode, our focus is going to be |
| 1:17.9 | on how essentialism and dualism bias our ability to understand ourselves. |
| 1:25.0 | Before we jump into the interview, I want to remind you that you can find complete show |
| 1:28.7 | notes and episode transcripts at brain podcast podcast.com. |
| 1:33.0 | Brain science is produced independently |
| 1:36.0 | and relies on the financial support of listeners like you. |
| 1:39.0 | To learn more, please visit brain science podcast |
| 1:42.0 | dot com forward slash donations. more please send |
| 1:45.0 | send me feedback at brain science podcast at gmail dot com we also have a fan page |
| 1:51.5 | on Facebook and you can follow me on Twitter where I'm at |
| 1:55.5 | Doc Artemis. If you'd like to get show notes automatically every month you can get the |
| 2:01.7 | newsletter by texting the word brain science to 554. |
| 2:07.0 | That's brain science, all one word to 5544. There's also a link to the newsletter on the |
... |
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