Humans disagree on many political fronts, but we're finding ourselves globally in a period of higher polarization.

And the question is, is there anything to be done about that?

Presumably, we're not going to get humans to not have conflict, but is there any such thing as

better conflict? What would that mean? And what does any of that have to do with brains,

or with the fact that modern humans only spread out across the globe 60,000 years ago,

or with social media recommender algorithms, or the Iroquois Native Americans.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, I examine the intersection of our brains and our lives. And today's episode is about something that you know I'm obsessed with from the point of view of brain science,

which is issues of conflict and empathy and in groups and out groups.

We find ourselves in a time of conflict now.

The things on everyone's mind are the war in Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas.

And even though those have sucked up most of the media's attention,

it's critical to note that we have lots of other conflicts also going on around the globe.

Right now there's ongoing internal conflict in

Myanmar. There's an Islamist insurgency in the Maghreb region of Africa. There's the Boko Haram

insurgency in Nigeria. There's a civil war between rival factions in Sudan. There's a multi-sided conflict of the Syrian civil war.

There's the ongoing civil wars in Somalia and Ethiopia. And Afghanistan has been in near

continuous armed conflict for essentially as long as I've been alive. Now, if you've been

listening to this podcast for a while,

you know that I'm very interested in why conflict happens between humans and why it happens

so readily and consistently. So in this light, there are three main things to note from the

neuroscience point of view.

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