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The Rest Is Science

Cognitive Ghosts

3/17/20261 hr 10 min

Ever wanted to squish a puppy just because it’s impossibly cute? Or felt absolutely certain you’ve lived this exact moment before?

Hannah and Michael explore the bizarre, everyday glitches of the human mind, unpacking why our brains occasionally seem to short-circuit. They dive into the weird neurology of "cute aggression", or urges like thinking of throwing your phone off a bridge, to the jarring time-bending sensation of déjà vu to reveal how our grey matter manages overwhelming feelings and sudden memory misfires.

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Clips

Shackleton’s Shared Ghost
How To Summon A Presence
Déjà Vu, Fact-Checker Brain
The Call Of The Void Explained
Dreams Before Dying
Amethyst And Not Getting Drunk
Blindsight’s Unseen Decisions
Movies Rewrite Our Reality
The Hypnic Jerk Mystery
Why We Throw Salt

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Michael Stevens· Host0:00

    Hello, and welcome to The Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

  2. Hannah Fry· Host0:02

    And I'm Hannah Fry. I've got a little experiment for you today, Michael, and all of the people who are watching and listening.

  3. Michael Stevens· Host0:08

    Okay.

  4. Hannah Fry· Host0:09

    Your job is very simple. All you gotta do is I'm gonna read you a list of words, and you need to count how many words on this list begin with the letter S. Okay? It's very simple. Just keep- Okay.

  5. Michael Stevens· Host0:20

    Yeah ...

  6. Hannah Fry· Host0:20

    just keep, keep the number in your head. Okay. All right. Here are the words. Bed, awake, tired, dream, blanket, doze, yawn, night, dark, pillow, rest, and nap. Got it? Okay?

  7. Michael Stevens· Host0:40

    Yeah.

  8. Hannah Fry· Host0:40

    All right. I want you to hold onto that number in your head, and just know that this episode today is all about cognitive ghosts. We'll come back to it in a moment. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

  9. Michael Stevens· Host0:56

    If you wanted to type out the entire human genome, you would have to type at 60 words a minute for eight hours a day for about 50 years. Okay, that's the scale of the DNA rule book inside each one of your cells, telling it when to grow, when to divide, and when to stop.

  10. Hannah Fry· Host1:15

    And different tissues read that same rule book in different ways. So a skin cell doesn't behave like a lung cell.

  11. Michael Stevens· Host1:22

    And cancer can begin when those instructions change. Not one dramatic moment, but through small gradual edits over

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