On this week’s episodes of The Axiom Amnesia Theory, we’ve talked extensively about not allowing yourself to be an unhelpful bystander to injustices affecting your fellow humans. On this episode, Heit & Cheri focus on the more philosophical aspects of giving, receiving, and doing nothing. Is it really better to give than to receive? Is [...]

Eating donkeys doesn’t make you a jackass, but a lot of other things can turn you into one. The abbreviated list of things that can make you a jackass include being a Black president (but saying you’re not the president of Black people) and telling folks to take off their bedroom slippers, murdering an unarmed [...]

At this point in the evolution of technology, have you ever stopped to ask, “What’s that in your body?” With the advent of a pill or device that’s claimed to fix just about anything, it makes sense to question whether these things are really good for us. On this episode of The Axiom Amnesia Theory, [...]

How shall we educate the masses? Surely this is a question pondered by the wealthy elites–how best to create and maintain a system of indoctrination and preparation for the human workforce. In this episode of The Axiom Amnesia Theory, Heit & Cheri challenge you to think differently about the way you view education and learning. [...]

New York’s “Stop & Frisk” policy is such an egregious violation of human rights that we wonder how the policy could have ever been deemed acceptable, let alone legal in the first place. Furthermore, what’s the best way to put an end to stop & frisk? There have already been marches, rallies, protests, and an [...]

A few months ago we came across a video that detailed an experiment in which monkeys and other animals were shown to completely reject unequal pay. Check out the video below. On the surface it’s kind of funny to watch the monkey throw the food (pay) back into the face of the scientist (employer). When [...]

Summary “It’s impossible not to remember the bombshell Forum press conference that autumn Thursday, and, like the JFK assassination or Challenger explosion, where we were when we heard it. “The Announcement” shows what happened behind the scenes: how Johnson learned of his illness, the anxiety over telling family and teammates and the fallout that occurred [...]

Summary A high school teacher’s unusual experiment to demonstrate to his students what life is like under a dictatorship spins horribly out of control when he forms a social unit with a life of its own. This is a foreign film, originally in German, but it has English subtitles. To access the subtitles, you may [...]

Summary Is there more than one universe? In this visually rich, action-packed TED talk, Brian Greene shows how the unanswered questions of physics (starting with a big one: What caused the Big Bang?) have led to the theory that our own universe is just one of many in the “multiverse.” At the heart of modern [...]

Summary One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power thirty years later. Elliott divided her [...]

Summary In the early 1970s, Craig Haney, Curt Banks, Carlo Prescott, and Philip Zimbardo conducted a landmark situational study at Stanford University. The experiment tested the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to attribute causes of behavior to personal factors, underestimating the influence of situational conditions. For this study, a small group of college students volunteered [...]

Summary There are 6 billion people on the planet. Every single one of them are unique individual. We each have thoughts and ideas and memories and feelings. What is happening in your brain when talking and listening? This is not about mechanics of speaking, listening and understanding a language. This is about subjective sensation of [...]

Summary We are bad at making decisions. According to science, our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice. And that’s assuming that we haven’t already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious! Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation [...]

Summary In the field of brain research there is no subject more intriguing than the savant – an individual with mental, behavioral, or even physical disability who possesses acute powers of observation, mathematical aptitude, or artistic talent. This three-part series provides an enthralling look into the psychology and neuroscience of the savant’s mysterious world. 3-part [...]

Summary The Secret Life of the Brain, a David Grubin Production, reveals the fascinating processes involved in brain development across a lifetime. The five-part series, informs viewers of exciting information in the brain sciences, introduces the foremost researchers in the field, and utilizes dynamic visual imagery and compelling human stories to help a general audience [...]

Summary For most of our history, we’ve rested easy in the notion that there were three dimensions that have existed throughout time: length, width and height. Ah, the good old days. In the early 20th century, Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein connected our comfortable three dimensions with a fourth, time, defining special relativity using a [...]

Summary The documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology. The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently [...]

Summary Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says that time travel is perfectly possible — if you’re going forward. Finding a way to travel backwards requires breaking the speed of light, which so far seems impossible. But now, strange-but-true phenomena such as quantum non-locality, where particles instantly teleport across vast distances, may give us a way to [...]

Summary When you’re having fun, time flies. Waiting in a traffic jam, not so much. Your birthday was last month, and your mortgage payment is due in a few days. The fact that we perceive time is certainly no illusion. But is it really there, or is it something we invented? Early on in human [...]

Over the years, many archeologists and other researchers speculated about the origin and meaning of the stones assembled at Stonehenge. Researchers now claim that the original location of the rocks erected at the site was over 100 miles away. If this is accurate, it means that an ancient civilization carried the rocks an extraordinarily lengthy [...]

Summary This hard-to-describe movie, which combines talking-head documentary footage with a fictional narrative, attempts to explain quantum physics in terms most audiences can understand. The extent to which it succeeds will largely be the extent to which a viewer grasps the complex theories being addressed in those terms. Does matter exist? Does time flow in [...]

Amid pressure from USDA has a new pilot program under which regulators are training personnel at the largest biotech firms, that genetically engineer corps, to essentially perform their own oversight. This change comes as a result of deregulation and involves biotech companies like Monsanto, BASF and Syngenta. If it weren’t so tragic, this would be [...]

For much of my life, since young childhood, I have found explanations of the mysterious to be rather interesting and entertaining. As a result, gravitating toward science–chemistry, physics, astronomy, and cosmology–was somewhat a natural process. As with most people, stories of creation tend to absorb a lot of my thoughts, but more so ideas of [...]

Almost daily, we see a study claiming that our genes are responsible for everything from physical ailments to psychological dispositions. There’s a fine line between the discovery of a potential root cause for our issues and blame-shifting. Similar friends may spread healthy behaviors Where does genetics end and our responsibility for our own circumstances begin? [...]

Summary An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times. Premiering at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opening [...]