Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: does science shape society and politics — or is it actually the other way around? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc, Vera and Jürgen dig into the power of science from every angle: how a single narrow study (on smartphones and attention, say) gets stretched into sweeping claims it never actually made, why funding dependency quietly shapes which questions even get asked, and why neuroscience in particular has become Marc’s own “greatest defense weapon” against being manipulated. Marc also raises a genuinely unsettling scenario — deepfake voice and video good enough that he and his partner have already agreed on a safe word, in case someone calls sounding exactly like family but isn’t. Jürgen closes with a quietly profound question of his own: does it end with science, or does knowledge still need one more step to become real insight?
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Today the room continues with the power of science, and the question the group wants to dig into is this: does science shape society and politics, or is it actually the other way around — society and politics shaping science? What kind of interplay actually exists there? That’s what the room wants to look at more closely today, opening up different angles on science, society and politics under the umbrella of Power & Violence. There’s real curiosity about where this will go, and about everyone’s first impulses on whether science is shaped by society and politics, or whether science itself shapes society and politics. As always, everyone is warmly invited to join and bring their own thoughts, so the room can explore together whatever new angles come up. As a quick reminder, the whole room is recorded, so joining counts as agreeing to that being published afterward. There are three small room rules: a profile photo you can be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather not, or can’t speak right now, is welcome to use the chat instead. So: does science shape society and politics, or is it the other way around?
The host admitted to muting herself on purpose for a moment, curious who’d show up first this morning — and used the pause for some gentle teasing: everyone takes their time settling in each morning, and in that window she likes to chat with ChatGPT instead, which, she joked, is honestly a good deal faster at thinking than the room tends to be at 8am. So she’d asked ChatGPT what keywords might be useful here, and shared what came back: research influence — scientific research can drive major technological, medical and social change, and can shape politics by feeding into laws and regulations, say in healthcare, environmental protection or data privacy. Education policy — how science gets taught in schools and universities shapes how future generations see the world and which careers they choose. Science and the public — scientific findings can shape public opinion and behavior, for instance studies on smoking or climate change changing people’s habits. Politics shaping science — politicians decide on research funding, which directly affects which projects move forward, and political ideologies or interests can shape how scientific results get interpreted or applied. Scientific advising — scientists are often brought in as advisors to policymakers, and their power lies in translating complex knowledge into practical decisions. Technological progress — scientific progress creates new technologies that reshape society and shift power balances, think the internet, AI, genetic engineering. And the ethics of science — there’s an ongoing debate about where science’s ethical limits lie, where its responsibility sits, what role scientists play in society. So, she said — that’s what ChatGPT had to say. Are we done for today, or does anyone want to pick up a thread and dig into it together?
One participant, Ira, opened with some gentle ribbing of her own: she’d half-expected the host to say ChatGPT is simply better company in the mornings than the room is. She said she’d wanted to head off any more chatting with ChatGPT instead of with the actual humans present — though of course a conversation goes both ways, and nobody wants a monologue either, which is fair enough. What does neuroscience actually say about this phenomenon, she wondered, where between 8 and 8:20am it’s apparently hard to get a word out of the host, or there’s some kind of inhibition at play?
Neuroscience doesn’t have anything specific to say about that particular phenomenon, the host admitted, especially since things usually run pretty smoothly. She wasn’t sure if it was the new topic making it harder to find a way in — though really, these are things we deal with in everyday life too — or whether “Power & Violence” as an umbrella theme just feels heavy at first, and takes a moment to realize how much of it actually touches our daily lives. She genuinely couldn’t say, but she’d noticed it seemed to consistently take longer to get going since the new umbrella theme started. Maybe it’s summer and people are occupied elsewhere, who knows — but it couldn’t just be the early hour, since plenty of past rooms had taken off right at 8am with no trouble. She turned to Ira: did she see it differently?
Not really, Ira said — there had been literally hundreds of rooms starting at 8am sharp, some with genuinely intense, good discussions. As for today’s topic, in her view science shapes society and politics more than the reverse. Politics, as the host’s ChatGPT answer had already pointed out, shapes things through funding, setting research agendas, deciding where money actually flows. But she thinks we’re strongly shaped by science in how we think and what we decide, and in what becomes a topic for society at large — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That sparked a message in the chat too, from another participant: ChatGPT had noted that science is influenced by politics insofar as politics funds or restricts certain projects — but that can only go so far, because science should be independent of politics. So this raises the question of dependency versus independence in science, worth examining more closely, especially since in recent years it’s become increasingly visible that science is often reliant on funding — grants and so on. That’s worth a closer look too: what are the actual effects, whether it’s companies commissioning certain studies or something similar. That’s one entanglement worth naming, alongside the various funding schemes available nationally, EU-wide and so on, which come with their own conditions, documentation requirements, reporting obligations, potentially limiting how freely research can be conducted. How relevant that dependency or independence actually is, and how it’s playing out today versus in past years, and what effects it ultimately has — that would be a genuinely interesting angle to explore.
Vera picked up a few of the points just raised. On one hand, science clearly shapes us in the sense that we draw on certain findings, and that drives societal change. Just looking at religious life as one example: scientific insight has pushed belief further into the background compared with before, or shifted views that people once held, once it became clear that certain positions were no longer scientifically tenable. Of course, that kind of societal shift takes a very long time — it doesn’t happen overnight just because some study results exist. But you can see that findings coming out of science do get applied and used across various fields, and do drive societal change. Politics tends to follow along, in the sense that legal questions get discussed, certain frameworks get built and debated against that backdrop. Climate is a good current example — there are scientific findings serving as the basis for discussing certain angles and making decisions on that basis. And “science” as a word has come up constantly over the last three years around the pandemic too. So there are several doors worth opening here. What did Vera think?
On climate specifically, Vera said, it was science that first made clear we’re even dealing with a changing climate at all — someone had to actually research and establish how temperatures, water levels, ocean currents and so on were developing. All of that comes from science; without it we wouldn’t know any of this, we’d have no facts at all. At the same time, science can’t see into the future — it can only calculate, from what it currently knows, what might happen in ten or fifty years. Science can’t say that with 100% certainty today either, and there are naturally unknowns baked in; when science says warming might land at two to two-and-a-half degrees, or two to three degrees, we have to accept that it can’t be stated with full certainty — these are model calculations built from what’s already known.
Wonderful, the host said, and she wondered whether there might be cultural differences here too — whether science holds greater power or significance in certain countries’ societal and political development, through what we as a culture attribute to it, while in other cultural contexts it might have a different standing, and correspondingly less influence. That would be an interesting angle to think through. In Germany, she suspected, science already holds a very strong standing, one that’s only grown in recent years, to the point that it’s often wielded as a conversation-ending “trump card” whenever anything gets attributed to science. Though it’s also worth distinguishing here — something the room had touched on before — between science proper and, say, some company running a survey at some point, then deriving supposed facts from that survey, and further decisions from those facts, where real caution is warranted around vague general statistics versus what science, very concretely, is actually doing, and where the distinction lies. That’s worth returning to, so we’re genuinely clear what we mean when we talk about “science,” and about power within science. And with that, she warmly invited others to jump in with thoughts on angles not yet touched — which is when another participant, Marc, joined.
Marc opened with a quick aside answering the host’s earlier question about the slow start: he’d genuinely been confused this morning. He said he’d seen four different topics listed — starting with power and science, effects via politics, then violence against children — and was honestly quite thrown, not sure what to say to which topic. And then a different topic altogether had shown up, the power of science, with politics removed again. That, he said, might explain why it’s hard to jump in once your thoughts are already sorted around something else — that had been his experience, at least.
The host clarified: “the power of science” is today’s room title, and whether science shapes society and politics, or the reverse, is the actual question at hand. The subtitle matters too, worth checking whenever possible, since room titles have a character limit and can’t always fit everything — hence the room description carrying “society and politics” as additional keywords. What Marc had seen referencing violence in parenting and so on were simply upcoming rooms for the following days — that was probably the source of the confusion, and she thanked him for the feedback. What did he think of today’s topic?
Thanks, Marc said. His very first reaction to the host’s question was that it’s hard to give a 100% correct answer, because nobody actually has the 100% correct answer — we always see what we want to see. On whether science influences politics and what power it holds: of course science has power. It depends entirely on what someone’s actual agenda is. Does the person drawing on that knowledge learn from it, apply it to improve something, to build better processes — or apply it to hold onto power, by leaning on numbers, on studies? That’s what makes the whole thing so fascinating. If you keep reminding yourself that no single study is 100% correct — because there are usually two ways of looking at it, two possible answers — then it becomes clear that whoever leans on a particular study probably has a particular agenda, and someone leaning on a different study probably has a different one. And then it gets genuinely hard to actually engage your own judgment, to read across multiple sources and magazines and ask: does this actually make sense to me, could this be right, is there maybe another answer? But to actually answer the host’s question: yes, science gets used by politics, and therefore does hold power — but not ultimate power. Because when you bring politics back into it, elections happen constantly where science plays no role whatsoever, only claims, because most people simply have no appetite to engage deeply with a topic, and our main driver behind everything we do is motivation. And if you appeal to emotion, with promises you know you can keep, you’ll get certain results — otherwise we’d have a wonderful planet by now. If science actually had the power to steer every politician in the right direction, the way we talk things through here in the Deep Talk Club — where you might say “hey, what would actually make sense, what’s right,” and we trade arguments and I say “that convinces me, let’s go that way” — that’s just not how it works. If he were the political opposite number, he’d simply tell his own people to dig up a different study proving the other side wrong — maybe even try to discredit them, because his scientist happens to be a professor and theirs is only a doctor. It’s genuinely fascinating to watch how arguments get thrown around like that, always wielding science as the weapon. So yes — for him, science absolutely holds enormous power.
Thank you, the host said — and something worth adding here: scientific studies are, as a rule, conducted with a specific focus and under specific premises. That means the answers coming out of a study can really only speak to the exact thing that was actually studied. As an example she wanted to pull up: a study on smartphones and attention, one she’d seen referenced as neuro-news — on the side, she mentioned catching an error where that week’s newsletter had gone out a day early by mistake, worth mentioning in case anyone noticed. Anyway, the study in question, from Paderborn, looked at how smartphones affect attention, and found that simply having a phone lying on the table — even without touching it — measurably impairs attention. But the room had also heard, from a previous guest discussing Gen Z, that this doesn’t necessarily hold for the younger generation who’ve essentially grown up with a phone in hand — who might actually show something closer to withdrawal symptoms if they can’t have their phone nearby, have to hand it in, or leave it in a bag. So there could even be a reversed effect at play there, attention actually dropping without the phone present. She couldn’t say whether that’s true, but found it a genuinely fascinating case study in looking closely at exactly who a research group actually studied. In this case, the study looked at participants aged twenty to thirty-four — meaning we can only apply these results to that specific group. We can’t extend the findings and assume the same holds for sixteen-year-old teenagers, or people over forty, without the same study being repeated across a broader age range to actually verify the same results hold. The same goes for gender differences, social differences, and so on — all factors that show just how complex this really is. Why bring this up? Because it’s often not “science” as some monolithic thing making these claims — what even is “science,” that’s the real question — but rather many different pieces of research, each addressing a specific slice, and we only ever have results for those specific slices. Even when politics and society debate a given topic, it’s rarely a single study driving that; it’s multiple studies, each examining very concrete aspects in different contexts, each only answering for that aspect, not delivering some society-wide or political verdict. So care is needed on two fronts: avoiding misinterpretation, and drawing on a range of results rather than one, in order to actually make decisions on solid ground — especially given that we don’t have the full picture, only a partial sense of where things might be heading, because any given study only ever examines certain partial aspects. She also wanted to bring in a chat comment: scientists mostly serve a political consensus that originates in the private sector and gets an authentic-sounding coat of paint from science; science itself knows no dogma, only the funder does. She was curious where the room wanted to pick this up next.
Vera jumped back in with another thought on the word “knowledge” and science more broadly: you have to make a distinction here, because as already noted, there isn’t just one single “science.” The example just given was a specific study, likely put together over a fairly short window, open to her own interpretation. But science also moves on a much longer timescale — basic research, foundational science and the like, which has nothing to do with politics at all, running for years at universities, whether in medicine, astronomy, whatever the field, with foundational research unfolding over many years before more current, applicable developments eventually emerge from it. In her view, that kind of science has very little to do with politics or society at first, aside from needing funding.
Exactly right, the host agreed — there are short-term studies and long-term studies, both important. And as a rule, or at least ideally, studies aren’t conducted to serve politics or a funder’s interests, but are undertaken, in principle, detached from that, purely to investigate the subject itself and find answers to it. Depending on what the subject requires, in terms of time, a study ends up being designed short or long — it depends on what’s actually being studied and what methodology makes sense, not just the time factor but the whole methodological approach, deciding what form of study is needed to actually produce meaningful results. Marc, she said, over to you.
Thanks for that setup, Marc said, referencing the study. He mentioned, as he had before, that his partner is a wonderful teacher — and he says that deliberately, not because she’s his partner, but because the word “teacher” carries such a negative charge so often. He wanted to share a new train of thought connecting that study to teenagers. A previous guest, Andreas Wollermann, had been on before, and Marc had read that with smartphones, attention spans in class are dropping because kids can no longer concentrate. Discussing this with his partner, they talked about how digital media could actually be used in class, say by showing videos. And then, out on a walk, a thought struck him: if attention really is dropping — if, allegedly (he stressed “allegedly” on purpose), nobody can concentrate on a video longer than five minutes anymore — then logically, the entire film and cinema industry should be finished within a few years once Gen Z takes over. No Gen Z-er would ever go to a movie theater, since apparently none of them can concentrate for more than five minutes. He personally doesn’t believe that for a second. And what he took from that, without needing another study to counter it, was simply: observe what’s actually happening. If kids in class can’t focus on a video for five minutes, maybe the video is just badly made, outdated, a little boring, or they don’t understand the point of it. But if you draw the blanket conclusion “we can’t show videos anymore because attention is dropping” — well, playing amateur scientist for a moment, if nobody can concentrate longer than five minutes, that’s effectively the end of Netflix and the entire film industry.
Thank you so much, the host said — and that really shows how careful we need to be with our interpretations, and especially with the questions we draw from them. Even if the findings hold, we could frame very different questions from them — not just “these are the results, therefore we can’t show longer videos anymore,” but instead, “how do videos longer than five minutes need to be designed to hold attention?” Or, “how do we actually train attention back up if it’s dropped?” That might even specifically be the job of schools, in a sense — she thought here, for instance, of kindergartens, which are already tasked with preparing children for school, and which, in their final year, already build in things like letting children listen to longer stories being read aloud, training them to sit still a bit longer, so that later they’re better equipped to listen to a teacher for an extended stretch. You can judge that however you like, but ultimately these are exactly the kind of forward-looking approaches where people think ahead about what school will require and build small pieces of that training playfully into everyday kindergarten life already. Did anyone want to add to that? Marc, go ahead.
For him, Marc said, the power of science ties directly into the power of media, and the power to stop believing things at all — that’s the biggest challenge he sees coming in his own future, and he’d explain why. In the past, if he went to the library and read something in an encyclopedia, he’d think, that’s probably right. If he read something in the newspaper, he’d think, they researched that properly, probably true. The challenge his brain will face is that everything he reads, everything he sees, may no longer correspond to the truth at all. To help everyone understand what he means: two weeks ago, he and his partner already agreed on a safe word between them, because he genuinely believes technology will develop to the point that someday he might be on the phone with the host, and it won’t actually be her. As an example of where this is heading: if his son calls him in five years and says, “Dad, I’m in Barcelona, I’ve been mugged, please wire me two thousand euros” — in his son’s own voice — that will be technically trivial to fake. If he thinks he’s being clever and says, “anyone could say that, let’s FaceTime instead so I can see it’s really you” — soon enough, technology will make it entirely possible to fake that too, seeing his son’s face, hearing his voice, having a real-seeming conversation. And the job his brain will face, something it’s never had to do before, is figuring out: is this really my son? Because the machine will convincingly mirror back the voice, the face — so his brain will say, yes, it’s him. And he won’t be able to tell otherwise. The technology will be so good he genuinely won’t be able to figure it out. Which is why, absurd as it sounds, he’s realized that even in his private life, when his son isn’t physically standing in front of him, he’ll need some kind of two-factor authentication — something like, “we were together this weekend, what did we laugh about?” — something only his real son could know. That’s the challenge he’s already watching unfold, ever since a certain former US president made it normal to simply claim that whatever someone else says is untrue, that he has different information, and so on. And it’ll only get harder, precisely because he can verify things with his own eyes, his own ears, his own reading and accumulated knowledge — and even that still might not be right.
Thank you so much, the host said, turning to Vera — anything to add?
Not on that point, Vera said, but on the students’ concentration and attention: this isn’t just about students. She used to run training sessions herself, often in retail stores after closing time, and staff concentration wasn’t exactly high at that point either. Whenever she noticed attention dropping, she’d simply build in a short break — something like, “does everyone still have something to drink?” — to reset before diving back into the material, because an inability to concentrate is often just as much about being overwhelmed, or tired, as anything else.
Wonderful, the host said — and that really shows the complexity of these topics too, a lovely example to walk through. Attention is shaped by all kinds of factors — even just when a training session happens plays a role, when attention peaks or dips. There’s research on exactly this kind of thing — you could genuinely debate whether 8am is the right time to start school at all, since that’s often not when we’re actually sharpest or most receptive, and not just in terms of early birds versus late risers, but as a broader topic tied to different innate chronotypes. There are studies on this too — some people really are early birds, and some genuinely only get going later, so to speak. And based on that, plenty of decisions could be made differently, plenty of things reshaped. This example is a perfect illustration of how results coming out of science get applied or picked up, get interpreted on one hand, and sometimes misinterpreted or over-generalized on the other, well beyond what the study itself actually claims — which is exactly why real caution is needed. At the same time, that’s also where the power of science shows up: when you look at science as a whole, interdisciplinary, pulling together various results over a longer stretch of time, piecing together the puzzle, that ultimately does have a real effect over time on how, say, society and politics change — and vice versa, with society and politics also exerting real power and influence back onto science. Genuinely interesting to watch. Anyone want to add to that?
Yes, Marc said — he kept coming back to this because it’s genuinely foundational for him: the single most fascinating science, the one that affects every single person in the room, 100%, is neuroscience. Because that science, and the host’s own contributions on it, on why we believe what we believe, why we do what we do, has had such an elementary influence on his life — far more, almost, than any subject he ever took in school, because it affects him every single day, every hour of his life. That’s why this topic matters so much to him, and he appreciated the promise that it would keep coming back around, because this science can so fundamentally shape our path forward. He never used to think about why he believed what he believed — it just felt right, no need to examine it. But understanding these foundational processes, before even engaging with anything else, is for him the single greatest defense there is: being able to recognize when someone is storytelling, when he’s being influenced, what a politician is actually doing. It’s not even about engaging with the content someone is presenting first, but understanding, ahead of time, what processes are happening inside himself, and by what methods he’s being steered in a given direction.
Thank you so much, the host said — and it’s worth recognizing the limits here too: yes, we have some ability to shape and resist manipulation, and yet we’re still constantly exposed to it, and still fall into the same traps given how the brain actually works — even when we’d rather not admit that certain processes are running quietly in the background. And understanding how the brain works may well explain part of why we perceive science the way we do, or why, once findings from short- or long-term studies exist, we tend toward over-generalizing them. All of that is, in itself, a brain process too — we need orientation, guardrails, routines. What we’re constantly doing is drawing inferences that make life easier elsewhere, for instance to make decisions. That’s part of why companies, to take an example, are endlessly hunting for formulas — they’d love some reliable method where doing A guarantees B. It doesn’t work that way, and never will, but the drive is there because it offers security. And that brings us back to basic needs: having something to fall back on gives us security, gives us guardrails, or at least hope and confidence that a certain result will follow if we do things a certain way, rely on certain numbers, certain findings. It’s genuinely hard for humans to tolerate the alternative, because our brains simply aren’t built to sit with the fact that not everything is answerable, not everything is plannable, that we simply don’t have an answer for a great many things. Vera had touched on this earlier regarding forecasts about the future — useful, worth making, but never carved in stone; a forecast remains a forecast, one that might play out exactly as predicted, or with some probability, but never with full certainty, because we can’t know today which factors we may not have accounted for in the calculation. Any forecast is only as good as the factors that were actually fed into the system computing it — if some factor we haven’t even thought of today isn’t included, the result can’t be fully correct either. It sounds rational and plausible on the surface, and yet we keep gravitating toward treating such things rigidly in discussion anyway. Vera, go ahead.
And on top of that, Vera added, scientific knowledge keeps moving forward — a result from twenty years ago might not hold true today, or only partly, because science has gained new insight since. You can’t exactly say what was claimed twenty years ago was wrong; the research and understanding simply kept moving, it never stands still, and we only ever catch a fraction of what’s actually being researched anyway — certainly she does. That has to be kept in mind. And on power specifically, she’d just been thinking: power probably varies a great deal depending on which branch of science we’re talking about — some fields surely have very little influence on society and politics, others clearly far more.
Marc, did he want to follow up on that?
Something else had occurred to him, Marc said, connected to what had just been said: the host had used two really powerful words — guardrails and security. Those are two very potent words for him too, especially in politics, and for what it means for us as people. People feel a need for a guardrail, a direction, and for security. And the word “responsibility” had immediately come to mind, because just because a scientist, or a political party I happen to like, hands me a guardrail — or fails to, or fakes a sense of security, or fails to — doesn’t mean I get to skip questioning and checking it myself. Because if I hand off responsibility and say, well, the doctor said so, the professor said so, that institute said so, I’m off the hook, that must be right, and I can go back to doing whatever I actually enjoy — that matters enormously to him, because you can watch this exact dynamic get exploited in politics: either false guardrails get handed out, or guardrails are simply missing, or security gets faked, and we need to keep asking and re-asking: is what they’re saying actually true, and where does that information even come from? Otherwise we’re making it too easy on ourselves.
And it’s worth not underestimating technological development either, the host added — which plays its own role in why certain insights only become achievable today, things that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago simply because the technological means didn’t exist yet. That’s a process that has to be factored in too. She found it fascinating, in that context, learning that when Albert Einstein died, he willed his brain to science so it could be studied later. That was in 1955, and the scientists of the time didn’t dare touch it. It wasn’t until 1980 that a Canadian team of researchers finally took on Einstein’s brain and examined it more closely. Even within those roughly twenty-five years, real technological development had occurred — not something to underestimate either, in terms of what becomes technically possible or not. And many of the breakthroughs made in neuroscience — a field that has actually existed for a long time but has only really taken off in recent decades — came about precisely because technological progress made it possible to study the brain in ways that simply weren’t achievable before. That doesn’t make the earlier theories and studies any less important — they form the foundation that later work builds on and continues from. But it shows just how large a role technology plays here. Jürgen, good morning — what did he think?
Good morning to the host and everyone in the room, Jürgen said. The mention of Einstein had been the spark for something he’d been sitting with, not yet fully resolved — which is why he hadn’t taken the stage yet. He’d been thinking about the room’s subtitle, how society, politics and science influence each other, and had mentally built a triangle between politics, society and science. First, he thought, you’d need to examine the existing relationships within that web, their effects and their strength — specifically, what happens to that web if you remove one of the three positions. In this case: if there were no science, would society still exist, and would politics still exist? And vice versa — if there were no politics, would society and science still exist? Those were the thoughts the room, gratefully, had set in motion for him. Working through it, he’d arrived, provisionally, at the conclusion that politics will always exist wherever any society exists, because politics is really nothing more than an anchoring — guardrails, to borrow Marc’s and Vera’s word, thank you both — norms and laws that stabilize and organize a society’s cooperation. And there are institutions dedicated to maintaining that, no matter how small the society is — even a family, as the room had touched on before, has its own internal politics. So he’d concluded that society effectively equals, or rather, politics is simply part of society. Which let him reduce the web down to two positions: society and science. And the question that then arises for him is: can a society exist without science? Or does science exist if I’m not part of a society at all? That was the seed planted by Einstein. Because Einstein was a brilliant thinker, as there have been many — Leonardo da Vinci is another good example — people who carried science within themselves, a force, in a sense, capable of generating new knowledge and insight on their own. But both of them still needed society simply to exist as human beings. Einstein took on work he considered beneath him, at a patent office, purely so that its light workload would leave him free to pursue science on the side. So his provisional conclusion, to wrap up: science always exists wherever a society exists, because within that society there are people striving for knowledge and insight — and that society, eventually, comes to recognize what that insight was actually worth, as with Einstein, sometimes only after years have passed. So, in his current thinking, the two are mutually dependent. Thanks for listening.
Thank you so much, the host said — and that actually loops back to neuroscience findings too. In essence, we’re all born as researchers: people don’t just want to know how something works, they want to know why it works. We see it in small children, endlessly peppering us with questions — why is a rainbow colorful, why do frogs croak, why do leaves turn brown in autumn, and so on. It’s simply built into us. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that science as a field developed at all, with people leaning further into research to explore things and find answers. So, absolutely agreeing with Jürgen there. At the same time, we do need to stay cautious with findings coming out of science, wary of over-generalizing them, or of leaning on them uncritically in the first place — and she saw a genuine weak point here too. Taking companies as an example: it’s often the case that companies and science don’t work particularly closely together — science, on the grounds that it studies its subject on its own terms; companies, because what happens in science often feels too theoretical to them, too abstract, not because researchers only study theory, but because it feels too distant from practical application. And yet she thinks it’s genuinely important to build that bridge, because on one hand you can and should draw on findings from science rather than stumbling around in the dark, building instead on knowledge that genuinely exists. And conversely, it’s just as important for scientists to understand where the real problems in everyday life actually lie, so they can connect to that and formulate targeted questions, aiming to provide real answers — so that the two aren’t entirely disconnected from each other, but that an increasingly solid bridge gets built between them. Though still, without creating a dependency — a company shouldn’t be the one commissioning a scientific study, and if it is, it certainly shouldn’t be dictating what the answers are supposed to be. Because at that point, we’re no longer talking about classical science simply examining a subject — and that’s when real problems arise, ones that aren’t genuinely helpful for society or for politics, in terms of decision-making or the developments that follow.
Truly fascinating, the host said — noting it was just past one, and suggesting the room move into its closing round. Vera, Marc, Jürgen — what were today’s highlights, or is there anything else worth adding before closing words for the room?
Vera went first: she found herself wondering where we’d be today, how we’d even be living, without science and research. And second, something that had crystallized for her through the conversation: maybe what we actually need is a kind of translator or interpreter, someone who breaks scientific findings down and explains them in a way an ordinary person, like herself, can actually understand and follow.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Marc?
Thanks for the room, Marc said. He wanted to underline what Vera had just said, and what he’s taking away from today is permission to keep questioning things — who’s saying what, and why?
Thank you, Marc. Jürgen?
Heartfelt thanks to everyone for enriching the room with all these points, Jürgen said — looking back over his notes, so much had come out of everyone’s contributions. What’s still turning over in his head as a further question is this: alongside science, don’t we need a next step that actually produces insight? The room had touched before on the distinction between knowledge and insight, and you could genuinely argue over whether there’s a qualitative hierarchy there, or even a temporal sequence — first you need the knowledge, and only then can you arrive at insight. But for him personally, the essential thing today’s contributions had left him with was arriving at that very question: does it end with science, or is there a further requirement placed on knowledge — to let insight actually emerge from it? That’s his takeaway from today’s hour. Thanks, and a wonderful day to everyone.
Wonderful, the host said — and she thinks that actually creates a kind of loop. She recalled once picking up this theme in the context of neuroscience myths, and choosing, as a headline at the time, something like “when science, science.” And really, what we’re generating first is knowledge — knowledge-making, so to speak — and insight is the next step after that. Which is, in her view, exactly what makes science what it is. Something worth sitting with: a study, once conducted, doesn’t end there — what gets discovered gets picked up again, either by the same team or by others, which is exactly why knowledge gets shared, so it can be built on again, treated as puzzle pieces feeding further research, connecting back in, generating new knowledge on one hand and, on the other, formulating further questions, trying to produce actual insight, actual answers. Because it can be thought of as an ongoing process without a fixed start and end point — a single study might have one, but it gets picked up again and continued, delivering answers elsewhere — which means we’re automatically part of that same process of insight too, in her view. A genuinely fascinating room, she said, with heartfelt thanks for the wide range of impulses and examples that came up, giving everyone plenty to work through afterward and maybe draw their own further answers from. Tomorrow the room continues with violence in parenting — how does violence shape a child’s development — as a way of preparing for the expert talk with Dr. Ria Nollte the day after, on “power in the classroom,” something she was genuinely looking forward to. Everyone was warmly invited to join again tomorrow at 8am to talk about violence in parenting first, and she was very curious what exchange would come out of both rooms together, and what conclusions might emerge from them. With that, she wished everyone a wonderful day and looked forward to tomorrow. Bye for now.
