Where The Wild Thoughts Are

Ian Sample, science journalist and host of The Guardian’s Science Weekly, steps in as interviewer. Jo Marchant talks about her new book exploring the present moment. They probe physics’ block-universe, sensory delays and predictive brain mechanisms. Conversation touches on cultural timeviews, altered time in mind states, and whether Now is illusion or a meaningful, stitched-together experience.

Since September we've met 16 scientists, in fields from neuroscience and quantum physics to archaeology and ecology, who are asking wild questions, exploring the world in different ways, wondering what if the world isn't how we thought. They've all been surprising, brilliant and creative in different ways: for me, each chat has been like a glimpse into a fascinating, hidden world.To finish the season, this week's episode is a bit different. I've asked my lovely producer, Julian Mayers (who also happens to be a cosmologist), to join me for a look back over some of our favourite moments from the interviews, from falling whales and Neolithic virtual reality to improvising ponds and moments of utter bliss...As we take a pause over Christmas, thanks to all our guests so far and to you for listening. This first season has been successful far beyond our expectations - we've been recommended by publications including New Scientist and Smithsonian, we were featured by Apple as a top new science show, and we've had listeners in more than 80 different countries, from Madagascar to Mongolia to Montenegro.We'll be back in the new year with season 2, so if you've enjoyed the show do subscribe now so you don't miss that when it comes.Bye for now! And see you next time on Where the Wild Thoughts Are.*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens if we let go of our expectations about nature – all the things we think it is, or isn’t, or should be – and just… listen?Our guide into the unknown this week is award-winning sound artist and ecologist David de la Haye. I first met him at this year’s New Scientist Live in London: I was giving a talk about the science of awe and David came up to me afterwards to tell me about the awe he finds though his work with sound. Essentially he puts hydrophones into the water and records the submerged soundscapes of ponds. He calls it sonic pond dipping.Rather than dissecting out individual noises or creatures – although that can provide valuable information – David’s work is primarily about listening to an ecosystem in an immersive and very personal way – almost like a meditation. He doesn’t stop at listening, though, he also answers back, creating music – often improvising in real time – with the ponds!I asked him how he ended up listening underwater, and what he thinks we can learn from these tiny wild spaces that we so often overlook. David’s home pagewww.daviddelahaye.co.uk Sonic pond dippinghttps://sonic-pond.net/With Ears Underwaterhttps://daviddelahaye.bandcamp.com/album/with-ears-underwaterBionic and the Wires (a separate project where mushrooms and plants are wired up to play instruments)https://bionicandthewires.com/ Clip 1: Pond at Wheatfen nature reserve, Norfolk, UKClip 2: Rockpool at Saint Abbs, ScotlandClip 3: Underwater seals at Mingulay, ScotlandClip 4: Pond at Wheatfen nature reserve, Norfolk, UKClip 5: Photosynthesising plantsClip 6: With Ears Underwater: Plant based patternsClip 7: Pond session: BlissClip 8: Awe response: First ever dawn chorus *** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kristin Tessmar-Raible, a University of Vienna researcher who studies how the moon times biology, talks about discovering brain light receptors in marine bristle worms. She explores lunar-timed swarming, mechanisms that distinguish moonlight from sunlight, parallels with human menstrual rhythms, sleep and mental health, and how light pollution and skepticism have shaped this field.

Caterina Moruzzi, philosopher and researcher blending music and AI, explores how design can make AI a provocateur rather than a shortcut. She discusses instruments shaping creativity, adding friction and tactile interfaces to spark reflection, and risks of de-skilling and cultural homogenization. The conversation spotlights slow, mindful AI practices that aim to extend human creativity and agency.

Can an AI have wild thoughts? Are machines capable of true creativity, true art, of going beyond the training and the prompts we give them in order to explore new worlds?My guest this week is Simon Colton of Queen Mary, University of London. He’s a professor of computational creativity who has been working towards this goal for decades, and he thinks the answer is yes… but only if we give AIs the freedom to choose what they create and to use their own experiences as inspiration.It’s an interesting approach that invites us to think about AI from the inside. Whether or not you reckon an AI can be conscious, AIs do have interactions every day – so many of them – and what you could think of as experiences that they could perhaps express in a poem or a painting.Simon and I discuss how to develop truly creative AIs – including projects of his such as the Painting Fool and the What If machine – as well as what the inner world of an AI might be like. What would it express, if it was able to do that through art?  My feature for this week’s Nature: Can AI be truly creative?https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-ySimon Colton’s home pagehttps://www.seresearch.qmul.ac.uk/cmai/people/scolton/Simon’s paper: “The Machine Condition”https://research.aalto.fi/en/publications/on-the-machine-condition-and-its-creative-expression/Painting Foolhttps://www.cs4fn.org/creativity/paintingfool.phpWhat If Machinehttps://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/horizon-magazine/creative-computation-and-what-if-machineSimon and Louis Bradshaw’s AI piano miniatureshttps://computationalcreativity.net/iccc24/papers/ICCC24_paper_178.pdf Mario Klingemann’s Bottohttps://verse.works/bottoHarold Cohen’s Aaronhttps://whitney.org/exhibitions/harold-cohen-aaron Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thinkers don’t come much wilder than Albert Einstein. His out-of-the-box physics transformed how we think about the universe: with his famous equation E=mc2 he showed that energy and matter are one and the same; through his theory of relativity he joined space and time into one malleable fabric that can morph according to your point of view.But we’re talking about a very different side to Einstein. My guest is Kieran Fox, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, all-round spiritual explorer, and author of a fascinating book called I am a Part of Infinity. Kieran argues that Einstein didn’t confine his revolutionary thoughts to the physical world. The physicist was also deeply spiritual: he followed what he called a “cosmic religion”, that he hoped would unify science and religion; mind and matter; us and the cosmos.Biographers and historians have tended to skate over this aspect of Einstein’s life… maybe they felt it wasn’t a suitably rational topic for such a hero of physics. But Kieran has pieced together Einstein’s religious thinking and traced influences from Pythagoras and Spinoza to the Tao Te Ching. He argues that Einstein’s spirituality wasn’t a minor sideshow, and it didn’t just co-exist with his physics, it was central, his ultimate motivation for wanting to understand the nature of reality in the first place.What was this sacred path - and is it still relevant today? I asked Kieran to tell me all about it.Kieran's home pagehttp://kieranfox.net/about.htmlKieran's book: I am a part of infinityhttps://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kieran-fox/i-am-a-part-of-infinity/9781541603578/Some of Einstein's writings on science and religionhttps://www.silene.ong/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AEinstein-Religion-and-Science_1930.pdfQuantum Questions, ed. by Ken Wilberhttps://archive.org/details/quantumquestions0000unse_n5j0Some of Kieran's neuroscience papers - on meditation, cognition, creativity and whaleshttp://kieranfox.net/research.html*** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Selen Atasoy, neuroscientist and psychotherapist who developed the connectome harmonics method. She discusses standing-wave harmonics in the brain, how psychedelics and meditation amplify high-frequency patterns, and the balance between order and chaos in consciousness. They explore criticality, links to development and nature, and why integration and authenticity matter for mental health.

Steady your nerves and light up your torches, because this week we’re clambering into the deep, dark Neolithic underworld with archaeologist Jens Notroff.Jens, of the German Archaeological Institute, has spent years excavating one of the world’s most fascinating and mysterious prehistoric sites – Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. This is a series of circular stone enclosures, featuring giant T-shaped figures and carvings of fearsome predators – and possibly also once decorated with human skulls. It’s sometimes described as “the world’s first temple”, and according to conventional thinking, it shouldn’t exist.That’s because Göbekli Tepe is around 12,000 years old. It was built on the cusp of the most important transition in human history, the Neolithic revolution, just as hunter gatherers were about to start cultivating the species around them, and it’s located in just the region where farming was about to emerge. Before historians realised the significance of Göbekli Tepe, they assumed the invention of agriculture was the flashpoint that led to the other changes of the Neolithic, such as more settled communities, and the ability to build impressive monuments like Stonehenge. But the giant stones of Göbekli Tepe, dating to just before all of that, tell us something else – a dramatic, shocking shift in mindset – was already underway.With Jens as our guide, let’s travel back 12,000 years. What wild rituals played out at this deathly site? How did humans take that first leap in thinking, that has defined our species perhaps more than any other, of separating ourselves from – and elevating ourselves above – the rest of nature. And how does it feel to put ourselves into the mind of a young hunter, entering these terrifying caverns for the first time…Jens’ home pagehttps://jensnotroff.com/Göbekli Tepe research project bloghttps://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/Taş Tepeler research projecthttps://tastepeler.org/en Recommended publicationshttps://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/publications/Skull cult at Göbekli Tepehttps://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1700564Göbekli Tepe World Heritage Sitehttps://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/There’s a detailed discussion of Göbekli Tepe and its role in humanity’s split from nature in chapter 2 of my book: The Human Cosmos.https://jomarchant.com/human-cosmos*** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re talking about life, the universe and everything – literally! My guest is cosmologist Marina Cortês of the University of Lisbon. Marina trained as a dancer before helping to shake up cosmology with some revolutionary ideas about the nature of time. As if that wasn’t enough – she’s now using the tools of theoretical physics to investigate the significance of life in the universe, in a new field that she and her colleagues call biocosmology. Marina’s work goes against many of the normal assumptions of physics. Put simply, you could see the conventional approach as attempting to describe everything in the universe through a set of fundamental laws and equations. And if something that we experience in the universe – like the forwards flow of time, say, or our ability to make our own choices – doesn’t fit into those equations, the mainstream view would be to say, well, that thing is an illusion. No matter how important it might seem to us, it doesn’t really exist.Marina is doing a different kind of cosmology, that puts life, and our experience of it, first. She’s asking, how can we use the mathematical tools of cosmology and theoretical physics to describe the universe we are actually living in? I think that’s such an exciting question, and it’s leading to some fascinating findings that could transform how we see life: from a process that simply shuffles atoms into different arrangements towards a force that continually rewrites the playing field, bursting beyond the fundamental equations and laws of physics to create completely new possibilities at every stage. I caught up with Marina for a tour of the “biocosmos”. Marina’s home pagehttps://marinacortes.org/ Introduction to biocosmologyhttps://marinacortes.org/cosmology-cortes-time-biocosmology-astrophysics-marina/#biocosmology Marina launching biocosmology from Everest base camphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HiNlqu0Lc Short talk by Marina on biocosmologyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TH4UsyE3fo&t=3s 2023 paper on biocosmology by Marina, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle & Lee Smolinhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378 The universe as a process of unique events: 2014 paper by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolinhttps://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084007 2021 paper on time and consciousness by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolinhttps://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020009/art00004 *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yadahttps://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.