How do societies get out of polarized eras?

And what does this have to do with the brain?

What does any of this have to do with broken down trucks or the Apollo program,

or the movie Watchmen, or education, or Iroquois Native Americans,

or a new idea for social media algorithms,

or moral taste buds,

and how we can take advantage of the common threads that bind us,

coming to see each other as fellow travelers

improvising their way through the same noisy world.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

Today's episode is part two of the question of what our brains have to do with politics.

Last week in episode 130, we talked about polarization. Why brains are so

predisposed for us versus them, for in-groups versus out-groups. We set the table pretty

thoroughly with that, but this week we're going to talk about how we might be able to fix that.

So quick summary from last week so that we're aligned.

The human brain is disturbingly good at polarization and dehumanization.

And this is why societies across history keep falling for the same psychological tricks. Last week we began with Rwanda in 1994,

where constant radio messages calling the Tutsi cockroaches reshaped how people perceived their

neighbors. That kind of language bypasses rational thought and dampens the brain's ability to recognize

...