Why does being alive feel like something? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that the answer begins with the body’s need to stay alive. Hunger, thirst, pain, and pleasure tell us how we’re doing and push us to act. These basic feelings, he says, are the foundation of consciousness.

Damasio returns to the show to discuss his new book, Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness, why feelings and emotions are different, what your dog knows about you, and why he thinks Francis Crick looked in the wrong place for the origins of conscious experience.

If consciousness depends on a living body, could a computer ever have it? And would uploading your brain actually preserve you? Damasio leaves room for a form of machine consciousness, though he argues it would be fundamentally different from ours. He also talks about what brain injuries reveal about the mind, how psychedelics change our perception, where human choice comes from, and why religion offers such powerful comfort.

Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Considered one of the most eminent scientists of our time, he has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of brain processes and their relationship to emotions and consciousness. He has discussed his research in books such as Descartes’ Error, The Sensation of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza, and The Strange Order of Things.

What do you make of an experience you can’t explain? A strange light in the sky, a book flying off a desk, a coincidence that feels too improbable to be chance? Social psychologist Barry Markovsky joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book Everyday Extraordinary and the experiences that have kept him studying paranormal beliefs for decades—including his own childhood UFO sighting and a supposedly haunted vape shop.

Markovsky explains how friends, communities, and our sense of who we are shape what we believe—and why changing someone’s mind can take more than better evidence.

Barry Markovsky is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of South Carolina. His articles on ghosts, UFOs, and coincidences appear at TheConversation.com, which disseminates them to major news outlets worldwide. To date, more than a million readers have downloaded them. His new book is Everyday Extraordinary.