Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

The 500 feet of wiring packed into fruit fly’s brain has been fully mapped – giving insights into how the more that 300,000 miles of wiring packed into your brain generates your thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions. These insights could also lead to novel treatments for the diseases caused when the wiring goes wrong.

Transcribed - Published: 4 February 2025

In 1925, a trial in a small town in Tennessee riveted the nation. In the dock was a young man named John Scopes, charged with violating a state law outlawing the teaching of evolution. The trial exposed fault lines in society that are opening again today, a century later.

Transcribed - Published: 28 January 2025

Music can lift our spirits, bring us to tears, spark our creativity, pace our workouts. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin explores all these benefits of music – and adds the recent scientific evidence that in some chronic medical conditions, music is medicinal.

Transcribed - Published: 21 January 2025

Alan and Clear and Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd chat about and play clips from some of the shows coming up in season 28. A major theme of the season is language – from babies picking up clues about their mother’s language while still in the womb, to male fruit flies singing courtship songs to female fruit flies, to a best-selling novelist second guessing some of the language she used in her best known novel.

Transcribed - Published: 14 January 2025

Offsprings of the Earth – Earthlings – we are most of us ignorant of the 3.5 billion years of experiments our planet has been through to produce us. Yet the story is there in the rocks all around us – if only we can decipher what they have to say.

Transcribed - Published: 7 January 2025

So much of our communication is spontaneous and yet we never really learn or are taught how to do it well – we’re just expected to do it. How to avoid being tongue-tied, whether when called upon to give an impromptu speech or when sitting next to a stranger at a dinner party.

Transcribed - Published: 31 December 2024

Eliciting the story behind a patient’s visit to the hospital can lead to better diagnosis and treatment than medical tests alone – and also reveals much of what needs fixing in health care today.

Transcribed - Published: 24 December 2024

Alan’s fleeting thought while chasing a spider around the floor sparked a conversation with an animal minds expert who argues that many more creatures than we imagine are conscious. What could this mean for our relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom – including those that annoy us and those we eat?

Transcribed - Published: 17 December 2024

Good analogies led to cheaper cars and Apple computers; bad ones to lives wasted and lost. And while puns might not always make you smile (or grimace), they helped pave the way for written language.

Transcribed - Published: 10 December 2024

As a Black graduate student disillusioned with academia, she founded Minorities in Shark Science (MISS). She now pursues her passion for sharks and outreach to a public fearful of sharks as a successful independent researcher.

Transcribed - Published: 3 December 2024

For most of us who live in the “tame” modern world, a reminder of how we can refresh ourselves by experiencing the wild world – even the wild world of our backyard or city streets.

Transcribed - Published: 26 November 2024

His research figuring out how our brains make moral judgments has led to two on-line games: One aimed at overcoming political animosity (and that’s fun to play!); the other to satisfy both your head and your heart when you donate to charity.

Transcribed - Published: 19 November 2024

Most of us have no idea how others – even our friends and neighbors – spend their days at work. What’s it really like to be a plumber, a marriage counselor, an ice cream truck owner, an author of mystery novels? In his podcast Dan Heath talks to workers in dozens of different jobs to find out What It’s Like to Be.

Transcribed - Published: 12 November 2024

The puppy kindergarten at Duke University is discovering how to spot a future great service dog while the dog is still a puppy. And it turns out that what makes a great service dog can also make your dog great.

Transcribed - Published: 5 November 2024

How the acclaimed TV series came to be and what it has come to mean since, as recalled in a new book by cast members Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack. Including stories you’ve probably never heard before.

Transcribed - Published: 29 October 2024

Alan and executive producer Graham Chedd look ahead to season 27. In a nostalgic look back at the TV series The West Wing, Alan recalls the scariest moments of his career; we visit a puppy kindergarten to spot future service dogs; a doctor tells stories that vividly illustrate the shortcomings of the health care system; and we meet a woman who can read our history as Earthlings. All that and more…

Transcribed - Published: 22 October 2024

Her doctoral thesis led to her becoming a member of the team behind yesterday’s successful launch of NASA’s Clipper mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa. Her contribution could help find out if beneath its thick ice crust, Europa is friendly to life.

Transcribed - Published: 15 October 2024

For eight years he wrote speeches for President Obama. Today he applies much of what he learned then in helping others with public speaking – how to craft a speech, how to connect with the audience, how to overcome the sheer terror of standing in front of dozens or hundreds of people.

Transcribed - Published: 8 October 2024

He’s had a legendary life as a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, banjo player, even magician. As Steve talks about these threads in his life, a picture emerges of the thoughtful side of this remarkable entertainer.

Transcribed - Published: 1 October 2024

A clarion call to those of us acutely aware of the peril facing our planet yet feel powerless to help save it. Ayana Johnson urges us to stop fretting about what “I” can do and instead think about what “we” can do, by joining our own skills and passions with those of others – and have fun doing it. Then, she asks in her provocative new book, What If We Get It Right?

Transcribed - Published: 24 September 2024

Escaping the Covid lockdown in 2020 he and his wife Laurel set out in an RV to travel across America along the Lincoln Highway – a road more aspirational than real. But with Abraham Lincoln’s spirit as their guide they talked with the people they met along the way to explore the urgent question of what can hold our fractured country together.

Transcribed - Published: 17 September 2024

Is improvisation at the heart of Western culture — music, art, literature, politics, even artificial intelligence? Author Randy Fertel thinks so. And he warns that as much as it’s a positive force, there’s also peril in it.

Transcribed - Published: 10 September 2024

Alan talks with Roger Rosenblatt about his new book “A Steinway on the beach.” It explores that great mystery of how being wounded—emotionally or physically—is both an inescapable part of life and a chance to illuminate it. It’s seeing the wound as the place where the light enters you.

Transcribed - Published: 3 September 2024

She’s a pioneer in figuring out how we might tell if any of the trillions of planets out there in the galaxy might harbor life – and if so, what kind of life.

Transcribed - Published: 27 August 2024

Chance events not only change lives, they can change history – as when a soviet sailor’s briefly stuck foot prevented a potential nuclear catastrophe. You can’t predict when luck, good or bad, will intervene. But you can learn to take advantage of it.

Transcribed - Published: 20 August 2024

Over time, the meaning of words often changes. The history of these changes suggests they're inevitable and that some of us (like our host) could be a little more relaxed about it and a little less peevish.

Transcribed - Published: 13 August 2024

Older people, says Mo Rocca, have better stories. And he tells many of them – stories of people as different as Colonel Sanders and Henri Matisse – in his new book Roctogenarians – older people who even in their 90s have achieved great things.

Transcribed - Published: 6 August 2024

Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include writer Roger Rosenblatt, writer Anne Curzan, and journalist Mo Rocca.

Transcribed - Published: 30 July 2024

Most creatures play– even octopuses, pigs, crows and bees. But play is much more than fun and games. Play teaches life skills and empathy – even morality. And it may help shape evolution. Want to play?

Transcribed - Published: 23 July 2024

An astrophysicist brings the universe down to earth. In brief captivating videos she tells the stories of how everything our world is made of – including ourselves – was created in cataclysmic explosions and collisions far out in space.

Transcribed - Published: 16 July 2024

When we experience things that seem beyond explanation, are they evidence of the supernatural? Or instead, a quirk of our brains? A skeptical but open-minded psychologist has some entertaining answers.

Transcribed - Published: 9 July 2024

Sharing her experiences of three space missions – including 159 days as the only woman on the 6-person crew of the International Space Station – Cady Coleman also shares lessons about getting along: valuable insights for the rest of us down here on earth.

Transcribed - Published: 2 July 2024

Alan and the author of a new book called Supercommunicators share their thoughts on what makes a great conversation. The result? A great conversation!

Transcribed - Published: 25 June 2024

The world of the very small is very different from the one we are familiar with. (Gold for instance turns red.) Chad Mirkin and Robert Langer’s skills in crafting this bizarre micro-world into medical breakthroughs earned them the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanotechnology.

Transcribed - Published: 18 June 2024

He is searching space for planets that are something like ours. She is searching brains to discover how we recognize things. They are both 2024 Kavli laureates – Charbonneau awarded the prize for astrophysics, Tsao for neuroscience.

Transcribed - Published: 12 June 2024

That was the question two determined astronomers set out to answer. A frustrating five-year search revealed that Pluto, long thought to be a small, lonely planet on the outer fringes of the solar system, is in fact part of a huge ring of debris left over from the solar system’s birth.

Transcribed - Published: 4 June 2024

Between them these two neuroscientists changed the way we think of our brains. Their insights are now opening new ways to tackle the problems our brains face as they age, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Transcribed - Published: 28 May 2024

Once sworn enemies in TV appearances and on social media, Fred Guttenberg and Joe Walsh got together privately and realized there is much that unites them. They are now on a tour of college campuses hoping to share their success in bridge-building with others divided by hate.

Transcribed - Published: 21 May 2024

Aboard his 100 ft sailboat, the geneticist famed for his work deciphering human genes spent 15 years sailing the world’s oceans, discovering millions of unknown genes in the microbes that live there – genes that could lead to new sources of energy, food and medicine.

Transcribed - Published: 14 May 2024

After a successful career as an award-winning magazine editor, Adam Moss decided to put it all aside to pursue a passion for painting. He became pretty good; but something was missing. His struggle to understand what that something was led him to his new book, The Work of Art.

Transcribed - Published: 7 May 2024

Should we be planning to establish settlements on the moon and Mars? To many, including a couple of billionaires, the idea has become almost an obsession. An unlikely husband and wife duo has spent years digging deeply into plans to colonize space. Their conclusion: not so fast.

Transcribed - Published: 30 April 2024

We exist because of the moon. Rebecca Boyle relates the amazing story of how the moon, born of a cataclysmic collision with an infant earth, has shaped our history, our evolution, and even our very existence.

Transcribed - Published: 23 April 2024

Her new book tracks the momentous events of the 1960s when her husband, Dick Goodwin, worked closely with both JFK and LBJ, and Doris worked with LBJ, as the two very different presidents shaped the future.

Transcribed - Published: 16 April 2024

Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include newspaper editor Adam Moss; science journalist Rebecca Boyle; and writers Kelly and Zach Weinersmith.

Transcribed - Published: 9 April 2024

Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio, has long been fascinated by the great physicist Richard Feynman. As has Alan. Stephen has devoted a year to making a remarkable podcast series on Feynman, and Alan has played Feynman on the stage for a year. They compare notes on what they’ve come to learn about him.

Transcribed - Published: 2 April 2024

In this special episode of Clear and Vivid we reflect on Frans’ life-long commitment to revealing how much we humans have in common with our primate cousins.

Transcribed - Published: 27 March 2024

When interpreting the Constitution, the dangers of relying solely on the words and what they meant at the time, without taking into account the purpose and values expressed in those words.

Transcribed - Published: 26 March 2024

A leading physicist herself, Shohini Ghose has wonderful stories about the trials and triumphs of the many mostly unsung women whose work helped open up the universe.

Transcribed - Published: 19 March 2024

We can get used to things to the point where even something we once thought wonderful can lose its luster. More sinister, we can also get used to the drip, drip of falsehoods till we become dulled to their danger. How to overcome habituation, and even take advantage of it.

Transcribed - Published: 12 March 2024

The intriguing stories behind the often weird and baffling origins of punctuation and other symbols we use to communicate. And it’s not just commas, colons and periods. There are pilcrows, octothorps, interrobangs and a whole menagerie more.

Transcribed - Published: 5 March 2024