How can we improve political dialogue?

And what does this have to do with discovering that the universe is behaving completely differently than expected?

Why do we all cling to beliefs even when evidence pushes against them?

What does this have to do with polarization and what if the

biggest problem facing humanity could be solved with practice? Today we're going to talk with

Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist, but instead of the cosmos, we're going to talk

about the inner cosmos. We're going to talk about

polarization in society and how we might be able to address that with a different kind of

thinking. 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.

And specifically today, why we think the way we do and whether we can improve our thinking.

Music our thinking. Okay, so imagine you've spent years as an astrophysicist, a space scientist, working to

understand the universe out there.

You've got a bunch of measurements.

You have your instruments calibrated to exquisite precision.

You've pulled in data from stars that exploded billions of years ago,

these little pinpricks of light you can't even see with the naked eye.

And you and your team have worked to stitch all of that together into a single picture.

And finally, you pull all this into one place and you plot the data and you look at the curve.

And something is off.

Let's say it's not dramatically off, but the data just isn't landing in a place that it should. Now, this is the key moment in science,

...