"I really believe that even humanity is at its infancy still. We're going to keep discovering things," he says. "Almost every time we've discovered something fundamental about the way that the world works, we find that biology has harnessed it in some capacity." 'We have figured out with our crummy little brains this meat inside this weird bone called a skull,' David Frum writes of human consciousness.
While operating on a 16-year-old girl who suffered from severe seizures, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried stumbled on the region of the brain that makes us laugh. To neuroscientist Patrick House, Fried's ability to produce laughter surgically raises deep and disconcerting questions about how the brain works. Join Fried, House, and EconTalk's Russ Roberts for a live broadcast from Jerusalem's Shalem College that is a sequel of sorts to House's earlier appearance on EconTalk. House and Fried discuss the mystery of consciousness and try to square the biological bases for emotions with the circle of our humanity.