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The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Your mind needs chaos

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In part three of our series on creativity, guest host Oshan Jarow speaks with philosopher of neuroscience Mark Miller about how our minds actually work. They discuss the brain as a predictive engine that builds our conscious experience for us. We’re not seeing what we see. We’re predicting what we should see. Miller says that depression, opioid use, and our love of horror movies can all be explained by this theory. And that injecting beneficial kinds of uncertainty into our experiences — embracing chaos and creativity — ultimately make us even better at prediction, which is one of the keys to happiness and well-being.  This is the third conversation in our three-part series about creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Support for this show comes from Grammarly.

0:03.0

88% of the work week is spent communicating,

0:05.5

so it's important to make sure your team does it well.

0:08.5

Enter Grammarly.

0:10.0

Grammarly's AI can help teams communicate clearly the first time.

0:14.4

It shows you how to make words resonate with your audience,

0:17.5

helps with brainstorming,

0:19.1

and lets you instantly create and revise drafts in just one click.

0:24.0

Join the 70,000 teams and 30 million people who use Grammarly to move work forward.

0:29.4

Go to Grammarly.com slash Enterprise to learn more. Grammarly.com slash Enterprise to learn more. Grammarly, Enterprise Ready AI.

0:37.0

When you think of what makes us human, what marks us as living beings would you say our powers of

0:47.3

prediction I probably wouldn't have at least until this conversation. It's true that our ability to process

0:56.1

information and use it to predict what's going to happen helps us craft survival

1:01.5

strategies and pursue our goals. But too much predictive power is usually

1:06.7

the stuff of dystopian sci-fi stories, where being creative and unpredictable are the hallmarks of humanity, while the power of

1:15.0

prediction is cast as the weapon of technology. And yet, one of the latest big

1:21.0

theories in neuroscience

1:23.0

says that we humans are fundamentally

1:25.3

creatures of prediction, and creativity

1:28.0

isn't at odds with that, but that actually

1:30.6

creativity and prediction can go hand in hand, that life itself is one big process

1:36.5

of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe that's otherwise trending towards chaos.

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