Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea

Now, let me ask you - Is it OK to chew with your mouth open? Would you wear your pyjamas when picking up the kids from school even if you could see other people’s disapproving looks? Would you even care? You might get a different answer depending on who you ask. The point is, we each have our own value systems that we apply when navigating our social worlds. But where does this awareness of other people’s evaluations come from and when does it first emerge? Sara Valencia Botto is a Doctoral candidate in Cognition and Development at the Emory Infant and Child Lab at Emory University.

They say, incorrectly that human beings have 5 senses: touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste.  There’s Proprioception – knowing which parts of your body are where without looking. Equilibrioception – a sense of balance. This is what keeps us upright, and helps us make our way around without getting hurt. Chronoception - the ability to sense time passing is undoubtedly at least a 6th sense.  None of the 5 senses can account for our ability to tell when a minute is up approximately. We could do it in a blacked out room, or at Disneyland.  But, if you were asked to wait an hour in each of those situations though, chances are your guesses would be miles apart.  Mikhail Lebedev’s - Senior Research Scientist at Duke University’s Center for Neuroengineering joins Jonathan to discuss our perception of time, machine/brain interfaces, and how we could theoretically slow down time in our brains so that we could live a year in the space of an hour.

In recent years the numbers of Exoplanets being discovered has skyrocketed.  We have a number of methods to detect these new worlds but for the most part they involve observation of the accompanying star in the system. But what if there is no Star? Just how many planets are out there going it alone and how do we go about finding them? Ethan Siegel is an astrophysicist and science writer and he joins me now... First Aired: 31/03/2018

Let’s face it, we’re pretty smug about our place in evolution. We’re the top of the food chain, smartest in the class, perhaps the pinnacle of natural selection on this planet. So why did our recent ancestors breathe, smell, sleep and maybe even feel better than we do? Dr. Kevin Boyd is a Pediatric Dentist and he may just have the answer

Emotions are, at their very root, the impulses we feel that makes us act. They’re our body’s way of steering us in the direction that evolution has instilled in us over thousands of years. They can be tricky though - even dangerous. Anger for instance, can alert us to danger or injustice but we can also find ourselves flying into a blind rage or screaming at a stranger in the street. It can protect and ruin us in equal measure - so why would we hold on to such a volatile emotion? Dr. Ryan Martin is Associate Dean for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences & Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, he joins Jonathan to discuss.