See See by Ceci

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1. Invisible Wounds: Beauty, Love and Justice in Restoring the Mind with Richard Mollica

   5 november 2026 · 2 uur 54 min

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   In a world where evil, greed and envy fuel wars, trafficking and exploitation, and where cruelty grows ever more refined, it is easy to lose heart. Yet there is another force, equally powerful and perhaps greater in its reach: the force of good. This episode is devoted to that truth, and to one of the people who embody it: Richard Mollica, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma at Massachusetts General Hospital.
   Trained in both medicine and divinity, he became a humble listener to the unspeakable. Over three decades, he and his team have cared for at least ten thousand survivors of extreme violence. He has also become a kindler of healers in more than eighty-five countries, all working to restore dignity and meaning, guided by hope and by his conviction that “there is no healing without beauty”.
   “I always found lurking inside the patients a spark,” he tells us, “a little tiny light of hope and of love and empathy. And I try to build on that.”
   Why is victim-blaming still so widespread? What is shame, and how is it passed down through generations? Can religion help with trauma? What role does culture play in healing, and can cultural memory be transformed? When people feel completely broken, what makes them begin to trust that they can heal?
   Join us for a tender and deeply humane conversation in which the sacredness of life is not only highlighted but emerges naturally. Professor Mollica shares what decades of listening have taught him: why telling one’s story can be the beginning of recovery, and why the healers themselves need care.
   An episode about the healing of invisible wounds, about resilience, love, empathy and justice, and about how hope can survive the very worst, with the people who help it find its way back; an episode that rewards deep listening with a quiet revelation: that beauty heals not only the survivor, but all of us.
   Co-hosted by Jesuit priest and theologian Father Felix Körner, wit… Lees meer

2. Beyond Diversity: Shadows Upon the Light of the Mind with Andrew Solomon

   7 oktober 2026 · 3 uur 32 min

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   An exceptional episode that explores the imperfections and shadows of the human mind, its decay, suffering and redemption, featuring none other than National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award winner, and Pulitzer finalist, Andrew Solomon. Lees meer

   This episode takes us on a three-hour journey carried by the hand of Solomon’s captivating, direct and powerful voice, one that leads the mind down its more concealed pathways with empathy and compassion on topics such as violence, identity, depression, suicide, and the discovery of how the stories of others reveal both our own, and the fragility of the narratives we tell ourselves about otherness.

   A man whose literacy and cultivated background converge with his sensitivity and humane sense of life, in this conversation Solomon generously draws on his own life experiences and on the rich and meticulous research that, more than a study, portrays a courageous and humane immersion into the worlds of others.
   From Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World through Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, to his upcoming and keenly awaited book Gone Tomorrow on youth suicide, based on his celebrated New Yorker essays, his work permeates the exchanges, elegantly interwoven with selected passages from Kundera, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Victoria Woolf and other titans of the world of letters in an episode designed to be savored and experienced to the full.
   An interview turned into an inward dialogue that poses unwelcome, yet deep and thoughtful, questions about the human experience and the quest for significance in an age of disbelief, with the genuine conviction that there is still hope awaiting in the unchanging antidotes we hold in common: love, and the surrendering to our shared dependence.

   *Andrew Solomon is a Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at We…

3. NDE: Mind Unbound with Eben Alexander

   4 september 2026 · 1 uur 48 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, we're joined by Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon for over twenty-five years, who shares one of the world's most documented near-death experiences: his own. For decades he operated on the living brain at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Born into a lineage of neurosurgeons and physicians (his father, himself, and now his eldest son), he was, like most in his field, a materialist: he believed the brain was both the beginning and the end of consciousness. In the autumn of 2008, that belief was undone completely. Lees meer

   An aggressive bacterial meningitis (E. coli meningoencephalitis) drove him into a week-long coma, his odds of survival falling to two percent with no chance of recovery. Yet with the neocortex, the seat, neuroscience insists, of all awareness, essentially offline, he experienced not nothingness but a journey of extraordinary vividness and detail. After seven days he woke, and over the following two months made a complete and inexplicable recovery: a case so unprecedented that three physicians outside his care documented it in the peer-reviewed Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. In this intimate conversation, he walks us through that journey and the framework he has spent seventeen years building to make sense of it: the brain not as the producer of consciousness but as its filter; consciousness as primary and fundamental to the universe; memory not stored in the brain at all; and a love so vast it holds everyone and everything. Guardian angels, past lives, quantum entanglement, prayer: he asks how such things might be reconciled with science.

   With reflections from Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Reverend Barbara Holmes, parapsychology researcher Dean Radin, and Jesuit theologian Felix Körner, woven together with excerpts from Dr. Alexander's Proof of Heaven.

   *He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University School of Medicine, t…

4. Minding Global Mental Health: Empowering the (Extra)Ordinary with Vikram Patel

   14 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 51 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, we're joined by Vikram Patel, global mental health leader, psychiatrist, and the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He confronts a contradiction at the heart of the twenty-first-century mind: why mental health is declining in the wealthiest nations, with record resources at hand, while some of the most effective solutions are emerging from communities that have almost none.
   In this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Patel walks us through what he calls the great mental health paradox and its two roots: a reductionist system that answers suffering with a prescription, and an individualism in which "disconnection is like a virus." He traces the asylum and the diagnostic manual; fifty years and tens of billions of dollars that have yielded no biomarker and no new drugs; the loneliness epidemic; the grip of poverty and inequality; and India's rise in youth suicide. Then comes his own answer: the community health worker, most often a woman, most often unpaid, trained to deliver a six-session treatment that cured two-thirds of people with severe depression and kept well years on.
   With reflections from criminologist Stephen Schoenthaler, neuroscientists Rudolph Tanzi and John Cryan, jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, writer Andrew Solomon, psychiatrist Richard Mollica, philosophers Paul Thagard and Stephen Cave, choreographer Alexander Whitley, sixteen-year-old activist Alexander Schmitz of Young Minds for Global Health, and three-Michelin-starred chef Eric Vildgaard, the episode gathers voices you would rarely find in one room. How minds this different meet on common ground is what we leave for the listening to reveal.
   This episode is about a scientist fluent in the resources of both the biomedical clinic and the community's own healing knowledge, and about the richness of a simple truth he keeps returning to, that what makes a life well is connection, an… Lees meer

5. Intelligence, Immortality and AI with Stephen J. Cave

   16 juli 2026 · 1 uur 43 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, Dr Stephen Cave, philosopher of technology, intelligence and the human quest to outlive death, joins us in our Berlin studio. At heart, this episode turns on two questions most of us would sooner leave undisturbed: why do human beings insist on ranking one another, and why can we not make our peace with the fact that we die?
   Academic Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Co-Director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity, both at the University of Cambridge, Dr Cave took his PhD in philosophy at Cambridge before spending the better part of a decade as a British Foreign Office diplomat. He is the author of Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, a New Scientist Book of the Year, and, with the philosopher John Martin Fischer, Should You Choose to Live Forever?: A Debate. He is also co-editor of AI Narratives, Imagining AI and Feminist AI, all published by Oxford University Press.
   In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr Cave traces the idea of "intelligence" across two and a half thousand years, from Aristotle's "natural slaves" to Francis Galton's invention of both eugenics and the IQ test, showing how so slender a concept came to serve as the perfect instrument for justifying patriarchy, colonialism and scientific racism. It is precisely this buried history, he argues, that explains the dread super-intelligent machines now inspire in us. The real peril, he suggests, lies not in what artificial intelligence might do to us, but in the deep-seated biases and failings already entrenched our societies, that is, in what we might be tempted to do to one another with it: in surveillance, in the automation of labour, and, above all, in the quiet erosion of the human relationships that hold a society together and lend our lives their meaning.
   He then turns to mortality: the four stories every civilisation tells itself to outwit death, why a genuine immortality would prove a c… Lees meer

6. The Tapestry of Consciousness and the Self: Winning Over Alzheimer’s with Rudolph E. Tanzi

   25 juni 2026 · 1 uur 41 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, Rudolph Tanzi, one of the world’s most influential neuroscientists, takes us inside the mind as it builds, and as it begins to come undone. Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and co-director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital, co-founder of the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, and named by TIME one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Tanzi co-discovered the very first Alzheimer’s genes and helped create the groundbreaking “Alzheimer’s in a Dish” model that has transformed the search for a cure.
   In this luminous and deeply human conversation, Tanzi traces the disease from its first description by Alois Alzheimer in 1906 (the strange plaques and tangles no one believed could cause a mind to slip away), to the golden age of treatment now within reach. He walks us through the three pathologies of plaques, tangles and inflammation; the genes he discovered and the blood test that can now see the disease coming; the brain’s housekeeper cells, the microglia, and their Macbeth-like turn from caretakers to killers; and the kitchen-sink logic of the drugs his lab is racing to trials: turn off the tap, unclog the drain, stop the overflow. He shares SHIELD, his lifestyle plan for brain health, and the gut–brain axis that lets food become medicine for the mind.
   And then the conversation goes deep. Tanzi reflects on memory as a tapestry woven from a hundred billion neurons; on the hippocampus, the little seahorse that gives the world its context; on why music memory survives when almost everything else is gone. He speaks, with rare openness, about awareness and the self, about lucid dreaming and terminal lucidity, about the feelings of beauty, awe and love that he believes AI may mimic but never be, and finally about his conviction that everything is, ultimately, consciousness.
   Along the way we hear neuroscienti… Lees meer

7. The Posthuman Mind Uncoupled: From Bacteria to AI with N. Katherine Hayles

   11 juni 2026 · 1 uur 26 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, James B. Duke Professor Emerita at Duke, Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joins us from the rare crossroads at which she has worked for forty years: literature, science, technology and, now, artificial intelligence. Trained as a chemist at Rochester and Caltech before crossing into literary scholarship, she is a foremost authority on the relations between literature and computational media, and the author of How We Became Posthuman (1999) and, most recently, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
   In this rich and demanding conversation, Hayles redefines cognition as the interpretation of information in contexts that connect with meaning, a capacity she ascribes to bacteria, plants, fungi, animals and, increasingly, AI. She walks us through her integrated cognitive framework and the SIRAL criteria (sensing, interpreting, responding adaptively, anticipating, learning); through von Uexküll's umwelt, the world each species spins for itself; through cognitive assemblages in which humans, microbes and machines decide together; and through her sharp distinction between actors and agents. As a literary critic, she also turns her gaze on AI-produced literature, on hallucinations as imagination, and on Walter Benjamin's aura in the age of the deep fake.
   With reflections from neuroscientist John Cryan on the gut microbiome, historian Richard Bourke on the Kantian self, classicist Richard P. Martin on AI and imagination, and choreographer Alexander Whitley on embodiment.
   This is an episode about the uncoupling of cognition from consciousness, Hayles' most crucial move. About a posthuman in which the human itself is being rewritten. And about the very determined optimism of a thinker who insists that hope is not the reward at the end of the work, but the precondition for it.
   N. Kather… Lees meer

8. Intelligence Without Brains with Toby Kiers

   28 mei 2026 · 1 uur 40 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, Toby Kiers, one of the world's most daring thinkers at the intersection of evolutionary biology, economics and ecology, takes us into the living web beneath our feet.
   University Research Chair and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Tyler Prize laureate, MacArthur "genius" Fellow, Spinoza Prize winner and co-founder of SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, Kiers has spent more than two decades asking the questions most of us never think to pose: How does a brainless organism make decisions? and, What is it like to be a fungus?
   In this rich and revelatory conversation, Kiers reflects on symbiosis as the hidden driver of evolution, from the first algae crawling onto land 450 million years ago to a soybean root in a Dutch laboratory today; on cheating as a force of innovation rather than a moral failure; on the exquisite sensitivity of fungal networks that respond to vibration, breath and light; on sanctions that are swift, severe and ingenious; on what she calls "punk science", research that crosses disciplines and refuses to accept the world as given; and on the humbling moment in Ecuador when members of the Sarayaku community listened to her describe her findings and replied: Of course this is happening. We knew this! This is part of our belief!
   She tells us about her team, the "underground astronauts" mapping the world beneath our feet, and about fungi as a "library of solutions" for a planet in crisis: a circulatory system that processes some 13 billion tons of carbon each year, roughly a third of all fossil fuel emissions.
   Along the way, we hear former Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander pose a question on the Cambrian explosion and evolutionary partnerships; we hear from Professor Katherine Hayles on the Umwelt, on actors and agents, and the uncoupling of consciousness from cognition; from ecologist Carl Safina on the cooperation between dolphins and fishermen and the… Lees meer

9. Beautiful Wild Minds with Carl Safina

   14 mei 2026 · 1 uur 38 min

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   In this episode of See See by Ceci, Carl Safina, one of the world's most eloquent and mindful voices for the living Earth, MacArthur Fellowship laureate, and author of environmental classics including Beyond Words, Becoming Wild, and Alfie and Me, takes us on a journey across species and into the very nature of mind itself. Travel with us into the open ocean, the deep forest, and beyond, in the company of whales, wolves, elephants, and owls, and discover what consciousness looks like when we stop assuming it belongs only to us.
   Safina is the inaugural Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and founder of the Safina Center. As a scientist, he helped ban high-seas drift nets and reform U.S. fishing policy. For decades, he has been asking the questions most of us never think to pose: What is it like to be an elephant mourning a lost companion? How do sperm whale clans announce who they are in patterns of clicks as precise as Morse code? And what does a seven-year-old screech owl named Alfie, who still calls to the man who raised her, teach us about trust, love, and identity?
   In this wide-ranging and deeply moving conversation, Safina reflects on culture and de-extinction; on cognition that thinks in echolocation, intelligence that lives in a pod's shared memory, awareness that grieves, plans, plays, and recognizes itself in another. He considers why the most astonishing thing about animals is not what we discover about them but how estranged we have become from our own world, and dwells on beauty as a fundamental force in evolution, not an ornament added once the basics are in place, but the very thing that makes the basics worth having.
   This is an episode about kinship: biological, emotional, moral, and cognitive. About the courage to see the world not as ours to dominate but as a big family we all belong to. Lees meer

10. Mind’s Ancestral Gatekeepers with Terri Lyne Carrington

    30 april 2026 · 1 uur 28 min

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    What is it about rhythm that dissolves separation and draws us into a shared pulse? At the heart of this episode lies a quiet but unshakable conviction: that every life, every struggle, every creative breakthrough, is a quest for freedom. Few voices today carry that conviction with more authority than Terri Lyne Carrington, four-time Grammy winner, NEA Jazz Master, and one of the most vital figures in music of our time. In this conversation, she traces the search for freedom from its deepest roots to its most urgent expressions in the present. It begins with a child at a drum kit, and a family sensing something uncanny, a story that reaches back across generations, and across oceans, to a lineage in which rhythm was never only sound, but memory, identity, and a spiritual code passed through the hands of those entrusted to keep it alive.
    From there, Terri takes us into what jazz truly is at its core: a kind of liberation theology. Born of displacement and oppression, it became a communal act of survival, intellectual, radically creative, radically free. And it is in that freedom, expressed through improvisation, that something remarkable happens: boundaries begin to stretch, time itself begins to bend, and the music reaches far beyond those who first gave it voice.
    But as you'll discover, Terri is not only conscious of history, she is making it. Through the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, she is carrying that same liberating impulse into new territory, challenging the hyper-masculine structures that have shaped jazz for decades and opening doors for voices that might otherwise have gone unheard. With this, she brings music into some of the most urgent conversations of our time: gender equality, and the building of a truly universal legacy. A vibrant episode, infused with Terri's ancestral rhythm and potent intellect, in which she returns us to the essential elements of rhythm itself: its flow, its healing power, and its quiet, seductive pull into that … Lees meer

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