We all know about the problems of fake news and the internet, and many people are worried about it.

But is it possible that the internet, on balance, is better for the dissemination of truth?

What does this have to do with Barbara Streisand's house or Soviet

agriculture or Kenyan elections or Twitter revolutions?

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

Today's episode is about truth and misinformation and the internet. So in the last episode,

I discussed the issue of truth, which has been at the center of the dialogue about politics,

about social media, about journalism for many years now.

And in 2016, a panel of experts was interviewed, and they said one of the grand challenges

was the issue of truth on the internet. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

And 2016 also happened to be the year that the term post-truth

was officially introduced to the Oxford English Dictionary. So what does post-truth mean? It was

defined as, quote, denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and

personal belief.

Now, the fact that this got enthrined by lexicographers at no less of publication than the

Oxford English Dictionary seemed to clinch the argument that this was indeed a new phenomenon.

But to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history,

this is a little strange.

It is, to my mind, the strangest romanticization

to believe for a second that people in earlier generations,

...