Deep Dive with Gül Dölen on Curiosity

Kelly Corrigan Wonders

Kelly Corrigan Show

Society & Culture

4.9 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2026

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kelly sits down with visionary neuroscientist Gül Dölen—who FedExed seven octopuses to her lab and dosed them with MDMA to understand how brains learn—and to explore what happens when you let wonder lead the way. Gül explains that our brains have windows when they're wide open to learning, that those windows known as "critical periods" close—and more importantly, how we might crack them back open. She and Kelly discuss why pure curiosity, the kind with no practical application in sight, has always been the source of our most important discoveries, and why deprivation and mystical joy might be two paths to the same place. Gül makes the case that there's magic everywhere if you're willing to see the physical world as miraculous, and that lasting change comes not from a pill but from what you learn while your mind is open. Note: This episode discusses neuroscience research on psychedelics, including MDMA. All references are to controlled scientific studies, not recreational use. This episode was made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. To learn more, please visit ⁠www.templeton.org⁠. Recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders. I'm Kelly Corrigan, and today I am wondering about curiosity
0:13.7	with a very inventive neuroscientist named Dr. Gould Dolan. Her research has appeared in
0:20.3	nature, science, and neuron, and her work
0:22.9	on giving MDMA, also known as ecstasy, two octopuses, went viral, challenging fundamental assumptions
0:30.6	about how psychedelics work. She runs a lab that discovered that psychedelics are master keys
0:37.2	for reopening critical periods, those
0:40.2	windows when our brains are especially sensitive to learning. This is the fifth episode in our
0:45.9	super trait series made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Today, we explore
0:52.3	what happens when a scientist chooses wonder over practicality.
0:58.3	Here's my conversation with Gouldaullin, recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
1:21.2	So you're an eight-year-old kid going from Texas to Turkey, and you see some sea urchants,
1:26.6	and you become, quote, mesmerized by the cool weirdness of the universe.
1:27.1	Yeah.
1:28.1	Tell us about it.
1:28.5	Yeah.
1:31.3	So I was really afraid.
1:38.2	I had always swam in swimming pools with no weird animals in it, just neighborhood pool in Texas.
1:39.4	Just gobs of chlorine. Just gobs of chlorine and lots of kids in the pool.
1:43.1	And then I get to Turkey to visit my grandparents
1:45.7	who lived there. And we went to the sea and we walked down to the water. And suddenly I saw
1:53.3	all these sea urchins and they're black and spiny and I was terrified. And I was refusing to get in
2:00.2	the water even though I love to swim. And my grandmother,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Kelly Corrigan Show, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Kelly Corrigan Show and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.