Big Brains

This year’s election might have been the most contentious in modern memory. It's not just that politics have changed, but it seems that people have too. You’ve probably heard this phrase: “People aren’t as kind as they used to be”. Maybe you’ve experienced the feeling that people are acting meaner to each other, year after year. But is it true? Are people really less kind than they used to be?With that question in mind, and as we take some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday, we wanted to reshare our episode with psychologist Adam Mastroianni. Mastroianni wondered if people are really becoming less moral in today's world, so he set out to find an answer, and published his findings in the journal Nature, “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” While the title may be a giveaway for his findings, he asks: If people are becoming less moral, why do we all feel the same way—and what can we do to shake this “illusion?”

What if we could predict the economy the way we predict the weather? What if governments could run simulations to forecast the effects of new policies—before they happen? And what if the key to all of this lies in the same chaotic systems that explain spinning roulette wheels and rolling dice?J. Doyne Farmer is a University of Oxford professor, complexity scientist, and former physicist who once beat Las Vegas casinos using his scientific-based methods. In his recent book “Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World” Farmer is using those same principles to build a new branch of economics called complexity economics—one that uses big data to help forecast market crashes, design better policies and find ways to confront climate change.But can we really predict the unpredictable? And how will using chaos theory shake up well-established economic approaches?

https://haarc.center.uchicago.edu/We used to think aging inevitably led to memory loss, but a small group of people—known as SuperAgers—are defying the odds. These individuals, all over 80, have the memory performance of someone in the 50s. The question is: how?One of the leading experts studying SuperAgers is University of Chicago neurologist Emily Rogalski. She explores the fascinating science behind SuperAgers—uncovering what makes their physical brains different and how their lifestyle choices could be the key to a having a sharper, healthier brain well into old age.

On Big Brains, we get to speak to a lot of groundbreaking scholars and experts, but some conversations we walk away knowing we’ve just heard from someone who is really changing the world. We certainly felt that way years ago after talking to University of Chicago scholar James Robinson, and it turns out…the Nobel Prize committee agreed in 2024 when it awarded him a share of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.Robinson was honored for the exact work that we talked to him about nearly five years ago. The author of numerous best-selling books, including Why Nations Fail (2012) and The Narrow Corridor (2019), he won the Nobel this year because his work researching what makes nations succeed and…what makes them fail. There’s no better time to refamiliarize ourselves with his important research and celebrate his Nobel win.