Why will your brain gladly flip a switch to save five lives at the cost of one life,

but it will refuse to push one person off a bridge to accomplish the same thing?

Why do Buddhist monks and psychopaths and patients like Phineas

Gage behave differently than you might? And what happens when ancient moral instincts collide

with modern problems like pandemics and AI alignment and political tribalism? Could a simple

online game reduce polarization, and could you

contribute to charities more effectively if you understood how your moral brain works? This week on

Inner Cosmos, my colleague Joshua Green helps us open the hood on human morality and asks whether we can build technologies that steer us towards cooperation in a world our brains weren't built for.

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 how we see the world.

And for that matter, how we see each other. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

When you peer into the human brain, you find a machine built on conflict.

On the one hand, it's exquisitely tuned to the immediacy of social life,

reading faces, sensing fairness, feeling indignation when someone breaks the rules,

feeling compassion when someone needs help.

These emotional circuits evolved to help

the oldest problems of group living, to bind us together, to keep our small bands cohesive,

to punish the cheaters, to reward the cooperators. These systems are fast and automatic and deeply intuitive. And at the same time, housed in the very same skull, we have slower, more deliberative systems.

This is the circuitry that lets us step back, cool off, calculate, imagine alternative futures.

It allows us to override that first impulse and to ask,

what actually leads to the best outcome?

...