Why am I going to start today's brain science episode by telling you about the Bader

Meinhuechhoff group, which was a West German far-left terrorist group in the 1970s?

This political group is fully irrelevant to any modern discussions, and their political positions

are totally irrelevant to neuroscience.

So what do these domestic terrorists have to do with attention and salience and the front

of your brain and synchronicity?

And why might you soon hear about the Bader-Meynhoff group,

again, not for political reasons, but for reasons to do with your own brain?

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 the

intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.

So let's start in 1970, when a far left-wing militant group called Bader Meinhof, also known as the Red Army faction, they took to the streets in Germany.

Now, they defined themselves as communist and anti-imperialist, and they launched a string of robberies, and then bombings and eventually assassinations. And this all brought a lot of

bloodshed and pain to Germany throughout the decade. Okay, now, who cares about the Bader Meinhuecheng?

Well, unless this touched your life in the 1970s, probably nobody. So, why am I telling you about

this gang? Are they coming back? No, happily, they are long defunct. But the joy of today's

podcast is that I get to make a prediction that you will hear

about Bader Meinhuech again, and it probably won't be too long. And then you'll think,

wow, I just heard about that on Eagleman's podcast, and now I'm hearing about it again. Now,

how can I make a prediction like that? Well, the important

part of our story began two decades after the Bader Meinhof Kang. It began with a man named Terry

Mullen in 1994. Now, Terry, like probably most people, had never heard of the Bader Meinhauf gang.

...