The Next Big Idea

"The only things that are important in life," declared the French filmmaker Jean Renoir, "are the things you remember." But what do we remember and why? That's the subject of a new book, "Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters," by pioneering neuroscientist Charan Ranganath. He joins us to

What if doing less is the secret to achieving more? That's the counterintuitive argument at the heart of productivity guru Cal Newport's new book, "Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout." Cal says that if we can learn to do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality, we ca

Raise your hand if you've ever belittled a stranger online, made a decision based on astrology, or, heaven forbid, fallen for a conspiracy theory. No? Well, then, consider yourself lucky. And if your hand is raised, don't feel bad, because it turns out in our Information Age the cognitive biases that kept us alive a fe

In “Psych: The Story of the Human Mind,” Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, lays out, in his words, “basically everything I know about the mind.” And when he says “everything,” he means it. Where does consciousness come from? Does IQ matter? What makes us happy? Was Sigmund Freud a madm

For a long time, Bianca Bosker was not on speaking terms with art. “Going to galleries and museums,” she says on today’s show, “reliably made me feel like I was at least two tattoos and a master’s degree away from figuring out what was going on.” What did art snobs know that she didn’t? Determined to find out, Bianca d

Do you ever feel like your life has become a film loop of the familiar? Maybe you sympathize with the elegiac poet Logan Roy, who said, "Nothing tastes like it used to, does it? Nothing's the same as it was." What lit you up on Monday barely sparks your interest by the weekend. But don't worry, there's nothing wrong wi