btrmt. lectures

“Ritual” is the word we keep for other people’s habits—the crystals, the pagans, the woo. Strip it back and your own life is wall-to-wall with them. The only difference is which ones you’ve decided to approve of. Show...

The most-listened-to neuroscience on the planet is a magic trick. Attach a brain part to any bit of ordinary advice and it starts to feel like science. Here’s how the trick works—and how to run it in reverse, so you...

Go and watch a tape of a so-called charismatic cult leader and the charisma everyone swears is there simply isn’t on it—just an odd bloke with a staring problem. So where does it come from? Not the leader. The followers...

<p>Go and watch a tape of a so-called charismatic cult leader and the charisma everyone swears is there simply isn’t on it—just an odd bloke with a staring problem. So where does it come from? Not the leader. The...

<p>Two ordinary people suddenly go insane together. It’s a premise we enjoy from a safe distance—because surely it could never be us. I’m not so sure. Shared madness isn’t rare, it isn’t aberrant, and it sits a lot...

<p>Meditation is the one practice everyone agrees on. It’s on the NHS, in schools, in every influencer’s guide to life, and the pitch is always the same: good for you, good for everyone, can’t hurt. Two of those three...

<p>The modern Western story is that real knowledge comes from science or careful reasoning, and anything else—the elder, the guru, the village wise woman—is suspect. But science and reflection themselves rest on a...

<p>Science feels like the most reliable thing we have. The opposite of belief. But it’s a belief system itself—a ritual, with all the failure modes that rituals have. And the receipts are right there in the replication...

<p>Everyone’s worried about social media and mental health. Jonathan Haidt sold two million copies telling us smartphones rewired our children’s brains. Thirty-five US states passed phone restriction legislation off the...

<p>Amygdala hijack, polyvagal theory, the lizard brain, vagus nerve hacks, brain wave states—these look like different theories explaining different things about human behaviour. They’re not. They’re all the same...

<p>Everyone’s been told that bias is the enemy of good thinking. Over 200 cognitive biases catalogued on Wikipedia, and the message is clear: your brain is broken, and if you could just think more rationally, you’d make...

<p>Everyone’s been told the amygdala is the fear centre of the brain. That it hijacks your rational mind and throws you into fight-or-flight at the sound of an email notification. This is nonsense—the kind of nonsense...

<p>Karl Wittfogel’s theory of hydraulic despotism was savaged by his peers and rightly so. But the pattern he was reaching for—that whoever controls the essential flowing resource controls the people—is the story of...

<p>Seed oils, raw milk, carnivore diets, tradwives, phone bans, anti-sunscreen, cold plunges—these look like separate cultural phenomena across health, diet, gender, and technology. They’re all the same pattern: the...

<p>Everyone loves organisational values. Corporates, militaries, sports clubs, schools—any place where people collect in a serious way has a list of qualities they want everyone to embody. But values are just virtue...