What if understanding how AI thinks could reveal uncomfortable truths about how your own brain works, and give you powerful tools to make smarter decisions, resist manipulation, and upgrade your cognition at the root level?
Host Dave Asprey sits down with Tom Griffiths, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University. Griffiths directs Princeton’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab, a research group focused on understanding the mathematical foundations of human cognition, and the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence. He is the coauthor of Algorithms to Live By and the author of the new book The Laws of Thought, and his award-winning research has appeared in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Together, Dave and Tom go deep on the cognitive science behind human performance, brain optimization, and the surprising overlap between biohacking and artificial intelligence. They explore why your body filters reality before your conscious brain ever sees it, how your mitochondria function as a distributed cognitive network, and what that means for longevity, decision-making, and neuroplasticity.
You’ll Learn:
-Why AI models reveal that humans may be more "stochastic parrots" than we’d like to admit
-How your mitochondria pre-process sensory reality before your auditory cortex even fires
-Why emotions like anger, love, and remorse are computational tools evolution built into your reward function
-How low energy and blood sugar directly degrade your decision-making at a hardware level
-What "resource rationality" means and how to use it to make better decisions under constraint
-Why AI systems have measurable psychological personalities, and which ones are least likely to mess with your head
-How neuroplasticity can eliminate the inner critic and reshape your mental operating system
-Why two-process cognition (fast and slow thinking) is a feature, not a bug, of human intelligence
Resources:
• Get Tom’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Thought-Quest-Mathematical-Theory/dp/1250358353
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Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
00:59 – Tom’s Background & Chronic Fatigue
10:22 – Mathematics of Mind
12:43 – Memory and Emotion
15:29 – Decision Making Under Constraints
21:10 – Computational Problems of Consciousness
26:14 – Meat Robots vs Stochastic Parrots
29:21 – Emotions: Game Theory
35:39 – Dual Systems: Model-Based vs Model-Free
39:22 – Mitochondria and Consciousness
50:00 – Testing AI Like Humans
52:11 – Choosing AI Models
57:14 – AI Research Questions
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