Explore the surprising things we know (and don’t know) about why people are the way they are through expert interviews, rare footage from historical experiments, and brand-new, ground-breaking demonstrations of human nature at work.
Every episode at a glance, color-coded by rating. Rows are episode numbers within each season, columns are seasons.
The best and worst episodes at a glance. Use this to find must-watch episodes or ones you might want to skip.
Would you reroute a train to run over one person to prevent it from running over five others? In the classic “Trolley Problem” survey, most people say they would. But I wanted to test what people would actually do in a real-life situation. In the world’s first realistic simulation of this controversial moral dilemma, unsuspecting subjects will be forced to make what they believe is a life-or-death decision.
Our nervous system is fundamentally electric. We move our arm by sending a signal to the muscles that control it. That means we can bypass our brains and use electricity to control our bodies, or use our minds to control other bodies. In this episode, I explore how we can use electricity and our brains to control cockroaches, move other people’s limbs, restore motion to people who are paralyzed, and even read people’s minds.
Scientists can’t dissect living people’s brains to study their function. But by examining the behavior of people whose brains are atypical (due to stroke, injury, or being born that way), we can learn a lot about all our brains. In this episode, I travel to London to meet a blind, autistic savant with astonishing musical abilities, and I volunteer to have my own brain’s function temporarily disrupted at UCLA’s Neuromodulation Lab.
Normal people can become monsters, given the right situation. That’s the standard narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time. But what if the cause of its participants’ cruel behavior wasn’t what we’ve always been told?
Each point is an episode, plotted chronologically. The colored bands mark season boundaries. Look for upward or downward trends to see if quality improved or declined over time.
Vote count shows how many people cared enough to rate. High votes + high rating = beloved classic. High votes + low rating = notorious stinker. Low votes + high rating = hidden gem.
Episodes plotted by rating vs. vote count. The vertical line marks the rating threshold (7.5). More votes = more engagement. Toggle above to compare against global or show-specific median.
A simplified view: one point per season. This smooths out episode-to-episode noise to show the overall arc of the series.
Did each season build momentum or fizzle out? Green arrows mean the finale rated higher than the premiere. Red means the opposite. Longer arrows = bigger swings.
Some seasons are reliable bangers. Others are hit-or-miss. Each dot is an episode. Tightly clustered dots mean consistent quality. Scattered dots mean a mixed bag.
Each dot is an episode. Clustered dots = consistent quality. Scattered dots = variable season. Hover for episode details.
