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  • 654. Predictive Brains, Placebos, Awe, and the Mind–Matter Frontier with Jo Marchant

    654. Predictive Brains, Placebos, Awe, and the Mind–Matter Frontier with Jo Marchant
    2026/05/25
    Jo Marchant is a science journalist and podcast host, and also the author of several books. Her latest works include In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment and Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body. Greg and Jo discuss the shared threads across her work: a long view of the history of thought and the mind–body relationship. Jo explains how physics and neuroscience challenge a single objective “now,” describing perception as an active predictive process shaped by past experience and expectations, with examples from illusions and sensory priming. They discuss predictive coding, placebo effects, psychoneuroimmunology, anxiety as attention-weighted error monitoring, and how mindfulness and awe can rebalance attention and reduce stress. Jo also contrasts flow with mindfulness, explores choking and depersonalization-derealization as over-attention to self, and critiques medicine’s structural barriers to integrating context and meaning. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why once you hear it, you can't unhear it 14:49: There are other times when we can consciously override things where, for example, if you hear, I don't know, a record being played backwards or something, and it might not, you know, sound like anything, and you're told that actually there's a satanic message hidden within the sound, and you see written down a transcript of what the voice is meant to be saying. So you're listening for it, and so that's adjusting the filtering that your brain's doing. And so it will sort of tune down some things, tune up other things, and then suddenly the voice pops out and you hear it clear as day, and you think, “How on earth did I not hear it before?” You can't unhear it. Perception is prediction 09:59: Everything that we perceive is being shaped by everything that we have perceived in the past and everything that we expect about the future. There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. 22:20: There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. It's all exactly the same pain. All of that pain or fatigue or whatever it is , is that integrated output of the brain taking everything into account that it knows, and then it's giving you this warning signal, and it's that sort of overall picture. And it's the exact same pain, whether that is purely coming from you've just broken your leg or something, or whether it's coming from a lifetime of stress and trauma that's telling you that you're in a really dangerous situation and something is wrong. The pain is going to feel just as real. Show Links: Recommended Resources: HeraclitusPlaceboDepersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DPDR) Guest Profile: JoMarchant.comWikipedia PageSocial Profile on InstagramYouTube Channel Guest Work: Amazon Author PageIn Search of Now: The Science of the Present MomentThe Human Cosmos: Civilization and the StarsCure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over BodyDecoding the HeavensThe Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's MummyWhere The Wild Thoughts Are Podcast Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 時間
  • 653. Crafting a Purposeful Life with Tom Rath

    653. Crafting a Purposeful Life with Tom Rath
    2026/05/21
    Tom Rath is a researcher and #1 NYT bestselling author of 12 books. His latest works are How Full Is Your Bucket? And What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily Superpower. Greg and Tom discuss the broader arc of Tom’s work, translating research on wellbeing, engagement, and strengths into practical tools. Tom describes shifting from self-improvement to “other-improvement,” using Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s question “What are you doing for others?” as a daily compass, and reframing purpose as an hour-by-hour “portfolio” rather than a single grand mission. He contrasts purpose with passion, criticizes status and social-comparison traps, and argues that the responsibility for one’s wellbeing largely rests with individuals because many employers and leaders model unhealthy, always-on habits themselves. Tom explains his concept of job/task/relationship/cognitive crafting, the primacy of relationships, and how AI increases the need to prioritize proactive, creative, human work over reactive tasks that are likely to be automated. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: What’s the point of any given hour in your day? 13:57: What's the point of any given hour in your day, and is it doing something that serves other people, makes a contribution to the world? Or is it something that kind of winds you up and gets you charged so you can be at your best for other people? Kind of just asking, the point of that is even more important now than it was 12 months ago because, as I've studied this and gotten more into all of the tools that are available at our disposal with AI right now, the things that can be automated and just require responding instead of thinking about something and initiating or creating, those are the things that are going to be eliminated most rapidly. So my mindset on this has changed a little bit in the last six months, even to say I think everybody needs to be a little more critical and ask some of those questions because if you're doing something that just involves pulling together some numbers or responding to some emails, that's not sustainable anymore. Your strengths don’t make a difference in isolation 50:31: The point of uncovering your natural talents or pathways is not so that you can go out there and beat your strengths into the world and tell everybody about your strengths. The point of it is so you can be more systematic about engineering how you apply those strengths to serve your clients and your customers and your community and the people around you because your strengths don't make a darn bit of difference in isolation. They kind of come to life in the context of a relationship and of a purpose. Can you make purpose more practical? 11:52: Telling people that they need to go find some big grand purpose at any stage in their life may do more harm than good because it produces a level of anxiety where you're thinking it's something larger than it really is that you need to find, or it's one big thing. Versus, as you get into the work, I've found that if you treat purpose like something you do on an hour-by-hour basis, and it's multiple touch points throughout a day, and it's a way to restructure what you do and reprioritize your daily routine, that you can make purpose into something practical. And when you're able to do that, your day is a little more rewarding. Show Links: Recommended Resources: EudaimoniaDonald O. CliftonMihaly Csikszentmihalyi Guest Profile: TomRath.orgLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileFacebook ProfileSocial Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author PageHow Full Is Your Bucket?What's the Point? Turning Purpose Into Your Daily SuperpowerStrengths Finder 2.0Strengths Based LeadershipLife's Great Question: Discover How You Contribute To The WorldIt's Not About You: A Brief Guide to a Meaningful Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    57 分
  • 652. Silent Legacies: How Enlightenment Philosophers Faced Mortality with Joanna Stalnaker

    652. Silent Legacies: How Enlightenment Philosophers Faced Mortality with Joanna Stalnaker
    2026/05/19
    Joanna Stalnaker is a professor of French at Columbia University and also the author of the books The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death and The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. Greg and Joanna discuss how Enlightenment figures faced death amid disbelief or tempered religious belief. Joanna says scholars have emphasized 18th-century death rituals more than philosophers’ personal end-of-life writings, and she links her interest to growing up with atheist philosopher parents to her earlier work on Enlightenment description, and Rousseau’s late writings. Their conversation covers models like Socrates and Montaigne’s, public scrutiny of deaths, last rites, and burial, and tensions between posterity and accepting oblivion. They discuss Hume’s death and ambivalence about his reception, Diderot’s Seneca-inspired reflections and critique of Rousseau’s self-presentation, Voltaire’s editing of Meslier and correspondence with Madame du Deffand, Buffon’s gradual “ossification” view of dying, salons and letters’ role in Enlightenment networks and women’s participation, posthumous publication, and the value of literary form for understanding embodied philosophy and equanimity toward death. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: On publishing a book against transhumanism 07:19: I published the book [The Rest Is Silence] that, in a certain sense, it's kind of a book against transhumanism or all these attempts to sort of survive, whether it be through technology or whether it be through spreading one's genetic material by having as many babies as possible. There's this—I see, in our current moment, a kind of denial of death through those various phenomena. Sorates is a model of enlightened death 04:53: Socrates is a model in terms of how to die, what one might call an enlightened death; how to die a philosophical death; and how to face death in a courageous manner, in keeping with one's philosophy. And that was a preoccupation for both David Hume and Voltaire. They were very aware that the public was watching their deaths and that there was great interest in how they would die and whether they would recant their beliefs on their deathbeds. They were thinking back to this model of Socrates, I believe. Can you separate philosophy from the way it is written? 39:04: One of the things that I want to insist on in my work is the fact that we need to take literary form and genre and style into account because it's very difficult. The philosophical ideas cannot be extracted from their form, and I, in this particular book [The Rest Is Silence], was interested in the question of embodiment because my book is really about them attempting, acknowledging their coming deaths but acknowledging that they lived as bodies, as mortal bodies, and attempting to find a way to express that in writing. Show Links: Recommended Resources: StoicismEpicureanismMichel de MontaigneJean-Jacques RousseauThe Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. BeckerDenis DiderotDavid HumeMadame du DeffandVoltaireBoredomAdam Smith Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Columbia UniversityProfile for the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities Guest Work: Amazon Author PageThe Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing DeathThe Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    52 分
  • 651. Redefining Revolutions: From Ancient Cycles to Modern Movements with Dan Edelstein

    651. Redefining Revolutions: From Ancient Cycles to Modern Movements with Dan Edelstein
    2026/05/14
    Dan Edelstein is a professor of French, history, and political science at Stanford University. He’s also the author of several books on revolution and the Enlightenment, including The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin, Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality, Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, and The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Greg and Dan discuss the changing meaning of “revolution” as an idea rather than a catalog of revolts. Dan explains how Greeks distinguished violent upheaval (stasis) from regime change, how “revolution” entered political vocabulary via Polybius’s rediscovered Book VI, and how fears of cyclical instability shaped mixed-constitution thinking from antiquity to the American founders. They contrast pre-1789 “revolution” as restoration (including England’s Glorious Revolution) with the French Revolution’s progress-driven, consensus-seeking model that produces counterrevolution, factional purges, and a “Red Leviathan.” The discussion covers Enlightenment cultural uses of “revolution,” the ancients-vs-moderns debate and historical progress, differences between Anglo-American common-law rights and French state-centered reform, the tainted term in 1989, revolutionary “playbooks,” and how literary training and novels illuminate revolutionary psychology. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: From preserving order to accelerating history 12:42: Once this new-fangled idea of historical progress starts to get going in France in the 18th century, suddenly you can have a totally different vision of yourself. You're not just trying to prevent change and maintain the existing situation as long as you can. Suddenly, you might become an accelerator—you might become—and this is when the word "revolutionary" emerges in France, in 1789—you want to be on the right side of history. You want to be, you know, in favor of progress. And so I think that this new idea, both about history and about the role of revolutions in this sort of progressive vision of history, it really has huge effects on how people think about themselves, how they act, and ultimately how these historical revolutions from 1789 onward play out. Why ancient thinkers designed politics to prevent revolution 06:52: For people, even before Polybius, people like Plato and Aristotle, this did become the question of political thought. Like, how do you prevent a state from being ripped apart by division and just leading to this kind of destruction and death that accompanies revolutions? And this is where we get the idea of a well-balanced constitution. Protection vs. power  39:02: The English and the Americans, you know, there's just this deep skepticism towards the government. You want to really protect the individual from governmental encroachment. The French are almost coming to the revolution wanting to empower the government for good, like it's going to solve all our problems. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Age of EnlightenmentRevolutionPolybiusNiccolò MachiavelliVoltaireMontesquieuJohn AdamsAnacyclosisVladimir LeninVelvet RevolutionMarquis de CondorcetAnne Robert Jacques TurgotBarebone's ParliamentMillenarianismJ. G. A. PocockNorman CohnStefanos Geroulanos Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at StanfordProfile at the Hoover InstitutionSocial Profile on X Guest Work: Amazon Author PageThe Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to LeninOn the Spirit of RightsNetworks of Enlightenment: Digital Approaches to the Republic of LettersLet There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of RationalityScripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of RevolutionsThe Enlightenment: A GenealogyThe Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French RevolutionThe Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too MuchYale French Studies, Number 111: Myth and ModernityGoogle Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    53 分
  • 650. How ‘Nudge’ Policies Shifted the Blame From Systems to Individuals with Nick Chater

    650. How ‘Nudge’ Policies Shifted the Blame From Systems to Individuals with Nick Chater
    2026/05/12
    How much is on us, as individuals, to fix the world’s great problems? Do initiatives like encouraging homeowners to switch to green energy really move the needle in the battle against climate change? After decades of these types of strategies, it turns out that needle hasn’t moved much. Nick Chater is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick Business School and author. His latest book, co-authored with George Loewenstein, is It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest Problems. Nick and Greg discuss individual frameworks vs. systemic frameworks employed to solve large social problems, why misunderstanding multiple casualties can hinder solutions, and how behavioral insights should be used to design and build support for systemic policies (e.g., carbon taxes, congestion charges) rather than marginal tweaks. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The two ways of seeing dilemma 05:07: I think our natural instinct, and this is sort of a basic fact of human psychology, is that we see things either as individual-level problems or as societal-level problems. So it's just a general point that we can't really see things in two ways at once. For example, if we take something like the increasing levels of obesity in the U.S. and the U.K., lots of countries around the world, it's very difficult for us to quite manage the psychology of thinking. Oh, at an individual level, say for me or my family, the interventions that might be appropriate are individual-level things. So I might think, oh, I want to just eat slightly different foods and slightly different amounts of them and exercise a bit more, and so on. And if I'm thinking about it like that, it's very hard to simultaneously think, oh, hang on. But that individual-level story can't really explain why obesity has risen so substantially over the last few decades. On weaponizing personal responsibility 29:27: If you want to stop your voters and the general public from worrying about these s-frame systemic rule-change things, a really good idea is to focus them on the i-frame. Say, well, wow, this problem is a problem, and it's a problem for individuals. So we need to individually worry about it. And once you're worrying about it individually, then suddenly you've forgotten about the s-frame. You suddenly think, "Oh, I might. I should reduce my carbon, and so should everybody else." In fact, now I can start to blame myself. I can blame my neighbors. Why marginal tweaks won't fix broken systems 17:51: I've had the experience many times of sitting brainstorming with teams of people where our objective is to think of something to solve, you know, let's improve, let's make accident care, an emergency or ER, I guess, in the US, how to make that, you know, safer and work better. Or how are we going to, are we going to, you know, get people to take more exercise, or whatever the issue is. And we're supposed to be brainstorming these sorts of little nuggets, these little changes, which we are going to hope to roll out. And it just always felt like just a really, you know, the solutions one came up felt incredibly feeble in relation to the scale of the problem. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Nick Chater | unSILOedNudge Unit Regulation for Conservatives: Behavioral Economics and the Case for “Asymmetric Paternalism"David LaibsonGeorge Stigler Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Warwick Business SchoolProfessional Profile on LinkedInDectech company website Guest Work: It's on You: How Corporations and Behavioral Scientists Have Convinced Us That We’re to Blame for Society's Deepest ProblemsThe Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising BrainThe Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    56 分
  • 649. Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMs with N. Katherine Hayles

    649. Bacteria to AI: Technics, Nonconscious Cognition, and Meaning in LLMs with N. Katherine Hayles
    2026/05/08
    N. Katherine Hayles is a professor of English at UCLA and Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is also the author of a number of books on consciousness and AI. Her latest book is titled Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts. Greg and Katherine discuss technics - recursive feedback loops in which humans and tools co-evolve. Katherine argues that cognitive technologies and AI intensify this process, so we design them while they also design us. She distinguishes cognition from consciousness, emphasizing fast nonconscious neuronal processing and defining cognition as interpreting information in context with meaning, operationalized by SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding flexibly, anticipating, learning). Katherine claims plants and bacteria meet these criteria, while physical processes are agents without choices; cognitive systems are actors that select and adapt. She applies this to computation, treating deterministic mechanisms as noncognitive but viewing modern systems and LLMs as cognitive, discussing aboutness via biosemiotics and LLMs’ “conceptual environment.” *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Are humans and AI evolving toward each other? 07:29: So we can chart the evolution of humans and cognitive computational media in just this fashion. So humans start by being immersed in their environment. They could not survive otherwise. And then humans evolve up to abstraction. Computers start with abstraction, and now, with sensors and actuators and networking, they evolve toward immersion. So humans start with purpose. Their purpose is to survive. That's true of all biological organisms. And then they evolve up to design. Computers start with design. But now, with AI, they seem to be evolving toward purpose, which is the same as biological purpose, to survive. Consciousness is based on selfhood and self-narration 10:27: Consciousness is based on selfhood and self-narration. The stories we all tell ourselves every moment of every day about who we are and what we're doing, and that consciousness frequently lies. We know that eyewitness reports, for example, are often very untrustworthy because people just perceive what consciousness wants them to perceive. And often that is not accurate. One of the primary purposes of consciousness is to make the world make sense. When highly unusual phenomena happen, consciousness just edits it out. AI can now see humans from the outside 37:23: So we're using our projective capabilities to imaginatively construct an umwelt and then seeing what that would mean for our existence, our sense of meaning or whatever. But we're always doing that from the outside. We're never inside anything but the human umwelt. Now we have a technology in large language models that is capable of seeing the human umwelt from the outside and telling us about it. That has never happened before. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Bernard StieglerInclusive fitnessChiasmusConsciousnessDaniel DennettJohn SearleStochastic parrotBiosemioticsUmweltSymbiosisContext windowLLMTerrence Deacon Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at UCLAFaculty Profile at DukeWikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author PageBacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman SymbiontsPostprint: Books and Becoming ComputationalThe Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth CenturyChaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and ScienceUnthought: The Power of the Cognitive NonconsciousChaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and ScienceHow We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary TechnogenesisMy Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary TextsElectronic Literature: New Horizons for the LiteraryWriting Machines Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 時間
  • 648. Civilization’s Imbalance and Restoring the Humanities: The Divided Brain with Iain McGilchrist

    648. Civilization’s Imbalance and Restoring the Humanities: The Divided Brain with Iain McGilchrist
    2026/05/05
    Iain McGilchrist is a former fellow at Oxford University and the author of a few books, including Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, and The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Greg and Iain discuss Iain’s work on hemispheric differences in the brain, especially in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things. Iain argues the left and right hemispheres embody distinct modes of attention—narrow, acquisitive focus versus broad, open vigilance—and that how we attend changes what we perceive. He rejects pop-psychology stereotypes and contends the right hemisphere “sees more” and should guide the left, which is useful but prone to delusion when dominant. Iain traces three Western cycles where early cultural flourishing gives way to left-hemisphere domination and civilizational decline, linking this to bureaucracy, organizational “exploit” drift, and modern metrics-driven thinking. They also discuss metaphor’s centrality to science, AI’s limits, mental-health decline, internet-driven polarization, and reforms to universities to revive the humanities alongside science. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Imagination needs a maintenance of open attention 17:57: See, imagination is misunderstood. It's not about brainstorming and writing down every silly thing that comes into your head. Imagination is about seeing something below the level that is immediately accessible to the conscious mind and listening to that and responding to it, and pursuing it, and allowing something to grow. Now, that requires patience, time, and a continuing maintenance of open attention. Once it gets closed down, you've lost it. So that's one reason that it won't work. And the other is that if you've got too many people involved in the bureaucratic side, that's not going to work well either. There are specializations, and take the hint from nature. They are so different that they do need to be kept distinct if you're going to survive. Your attention shapes your reality 40:05: It is certainly true that there is a constant dialogue between our minds and the world. The world influences the mind and the brain, and the mind and the brain, having been influenced, in turn influence the world around us. So we can get locked into a vicious cycle in which we see things in a certain limited way, and we think that's all that there is. And so that feeds back to that being the only right way to think. Science is based on nothing but metaphors 30:32: Science is based on nothing but metaphors. It is entirely metaphorical. And that's not a mistake or a problem, because it can't avoid—I mean—the alternative would be to say nothing. But it has to say it's like this. And metaphor is saying this thing can be understood by likening it to something else. And the problem is that scientists don't realize that they're using metaphors and that their metaphors both dictate what it is they can see and how they see what it is that they do see. So, models, which science can't work without, are simply elaborated metaphors. Show Links: Recommended Resources: PostmodernismExploration–exploitation dilemmaLateralization of brain functionDunning–Kruger effectAntonio DamasioG. K. ChestertonDaniel KahnemanLogosMythosV. S. RamachandranTheory of mindFriedrich NietzscheHeraclitusRenaissance Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at All Souls College | University of OxfordLinkedIn ProfileProfessional WebsiteWikipedia Profile Guest Work: Amazon Author PageWays of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the WorldThe Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the WorldThe Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western WorldTED Talk: The Divided Brain Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 時間 9 分
  • 647. What’s Missing From the Modern Education System with Susan Wise Bauer

    647. What’s Missing From the Modern Education System with Susan Wise Bauer
    2026/05/01

    Susan Wise Bauer is a prolific author, former instructor at the College of William and Mary, and classical education expert. Her books include, The History of the World series, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education, and most recently, The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy.

    Susan and Greg discuss the mismatches between institutional schooling and how kids learn, the historical context in which the U.S. education system was created, and practices for cultivating deeper learning, whether it be in a homeschool environment or reading for enjoyment. They also dive into Susan’s latest book, The Great Shadow, and explore how historical experiences of sickness have shaped daily life, persistent health beliefs, and current tensions between vaccines and wellness rhetoric.

    *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

    Episode Quotes:

    The education system mismatch

    04:49: The thing about this system is it actually worked really, really well. It did what it was supposed to do for over a hundred years, which was assimilate immigrant children, teach them how to speak English, teach them how to read, teach them how to write, teach them civic virtues, teach them the Pledge of Allegiance, all of these American things. The problem is that, you know, a hundred, 150 years on, 200 years on, that regimented system simply doesn't suit a good number of the students who are sort of marshaled into it and run through it anymore than every 18-year-old would do well in Army basic training. Some of them would do great, but some of them, it's just not going to fit. And that's the challenge that we now face with our current K-12 system.

    Books makes us human

    25:26: If we lose books, we are going to lose part of what makes us human and what has made us human since the invention of writing. We're going to lose a huge element of our evolution as people if we lose books.

    We need to create space where reading is just for fun

    32:22: So I do see parents wanting to push kids into harder reading too early, without them realizing that if they want kids to enjoy books, then they have got to make a space in the kid's life to read things that are too easy, because that's when we enjoy ourselves—when we're doing something that is not straining every mental muscle that we have. So we do need to create also this space where reading is just for fun.

    Show Links:

    Recommended Resources:

    • Montessori education
    • Mortimer J. Adler
    • Spontaneous generation
    • Wishbone (TV series)
    • Miasma theory

    Guest Profile:

    • Professional Website
    • Profile on Instagram

    Guest Work:

    • The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
    • The History of the World Series
    • The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
    • The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home
    • Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    51 分