Mind Field

I get candid with Grayson Brulte, autonomous vehicle expert, as we discuss the potential ethical issues associated with driverless cars.

Watch as a Peruvian Shaman performs his icaro—or healing chant—in its entirety, from my Ayahuasca ceremony.

With just seven days until my Ayahuasca ceremony, I fill out a recommended personality survey—which becomes a little revealing.

What happens when your brain is deprived of stimulation? What effect does being cut off from interaction with the outside world have on a person? What effect does it have on Michael, when he is locked in a windowless, soundproof isolation chamber for three days? This episode of Mind Field is both an objective and a very intimate look at Isolation.

We are all unique individuals. We follow the beat of our own drum. We wouldn’t throw our own beliefs out the window just to fit in...or would we? In this episode of Mind Field, I demonstrate the strong, human urge to conform, and just how far people will go to fall in with the crowd.

We humans love to build, create, and organize. So why do we also love to destroy things? Can violently breaking stuff really help to calm us down, or does it just make us more angry? In this episode of Mind Field, I take a hard look at our urge to destroy.

Would you reroute a train to run over one person to prevent it from running over five others? In the classic “Trolley Problem” survey, most people say they would. But I wanted to test what people would actually do in a real-life situation. In the world’s first realistic simulation of this controversial moral dilemma, unsuspecting subjects will be forced to make what they believe is a life-or-death decision.

Do psychedelic drugs really bring about self-healing and personal enlightenment? New research says they may. In this episode, I travel to the Amazonian jungle of Peru to experience the mind-expanding effects of the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca. I’m joined by Imperial College London’s Head of Psychedelic Research, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who measures the impact of Ayahuasca on my brain.

Psychology. Neuroscience. Drugs. All can be tools of interrogation. In this episode, an expert shows me how to coerce unsuspecting subjects into signing false confessions; a police psychologist questions me about my personal life after I am injected with a truth serum; and I match wits against a new brainwave-reading lie-detection method developed at Northwestern University.

Humans are the only Earthlings with complex language. But at what cost was that ability acquired? In this episode, Michael Stevens visit Tetsuro Matsuzawa to learn about his influential cognitive tradeoff hypothesis.

How are our moral decisions influenced by factors we’re not aware of? A phenomenon known as Moral Licensing claims that when we do something good, we often subconsciously allow ourselves to then do something bad. In this episode, Michael Stevens takes a look at whether those who donate money to charity become more likely to let a kid take the blame for a crime they know they committed.

There are 100 billion individual neurons in the human brain. Working together, they allow us to make sense of, and move through, the world around us. Scientists have built replicas of the human brain with computers, but no one has ever successfully made a brain out of humans. On this episode, Michael Stevens travels back to his hometown of Stilwell, Kansas, and turn it into a working brain!