You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

My guest today is a world authority in the field of artificial intelligence.

But it wasn't a fascination with robots or complicated computer software that drew her to the field of AI.

Rather, it was the deeper philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind and how computers could help with the answers that have obsessed her for more than half a century.

Maggie Bowden is professor of cognitive science at the University of Sussex

and her long career could be described as the very epitome of cross-disciplinary research. The profound questions she

spent her life pursuing, the human mind, how our brains work and how they evolved, could

never be neatly wrapped up within just one academic subject, so Maggie has spent decades straddling

multiple disciplines, from medicine and psychology to cognitive and computer science, technology,

and of course philosophy.

She's researched and written authoritatively on all these fields and along the way help create

entirely new academic disciplines.

Maggie Bowdoin welcome to the Life Scientific.

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