Why is there so much polarization in the world?

And what does this have to do with the brain?

And what does any of this have to do with how you picture a cat,

or why we respond to certain cartoons,

or the British nobleman, Lord Gordon, or the Iroquois Native Americans.

And why do you naturally feel that everyone who disagrees with you is a troll or misinformed?

And if you could just shout loudly enough in all caps on Twitter, they would see that you're right.

Why can't they see that you know the truth?

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

University, and I've spent my whole career studying the intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.

It hasn't escaped anybody's notice that we are in a time in which polarization and disagreement

is higher than most of us have seen in our lives so far.

And so in the past decade, I've become very interested in the brain science behind that,

behind polarization.

And more generally, how we come to believe our own

political opinions and why we're so certain that everyone else is wrong. And how if we could just

talk to them, if they could just listen to us, they would see the light and they would know that we are right

and they were mistaken. Now, I want to set the stage. Polarization is not a new thing. Although we

are in a polarized era right now, this is far from unique. Just think about the civil war in America where you had brothers and neighbors

taking up arms against one another. Or in the 1960s and 70s, people here held vastly different

opinions about the war in Vietnam and how to treat the returning soldiers or take stuff that's

even bigger like Nazism in Germany, which was the

...