Charan Ranganath: belief

Transcript context

…A bit of a big ridiculous question, but let me ask you. We’ve been talking about neuroscience in general. You’ve been studying the human mind for a long time. What do you love most about the human mind? Like, when you look at it, we look at the fMRI, just the scans and the behavioral stuff, the electrodes, the psychology aspect, reading the literature on the biology side, in your biology, all of it. When you look at it, what is most beautiful to you? I think the most beautiful, but incredibly hard to put your finger on, is this idea of the internal model, that it’s like there’s everything you see, and there’s everything you hear, and touch, and taste, every breath you take, whatever, but it’s all connected by this dark energy that’s holding that whole universe of your mind together. And without that, it’s just a bunch of stuff. And somehow we put that together and it forms so much of our experience, and being able to figure out where that comes from and how things are connected to me is just amazing. But just this idea of the world in front of us, we’re only sampling this little bit and trying to take so much meaning from it, and we do a really good job. Not perfect, I mean, but that ability to me is just amazing. Yeah, it’s an incredible mystery, all of it. It’s funny you said dark energy, because the same in astrophysics. You look out there, you look at dark matter and dark energy, which is this loose term assigned to a thing we don’t understand, which helps make the equations work in terms of gravity and the expansion of the universe. In the same way, it seems like there’s that kind of thing in the human mind that we’re striving to understand.…

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