Oliver Burkeman has been concerned for a while that Nuance has been vanishing from public discourse. For a long time, he thought it was just other people’s problem. But now he realises that even he himself is losing the nuance that was integral to his view of the world.

In the first episode Oliver explores why our brains are primed for binary decisions, rather than nuanced thought. He finds out from Dr Kevin Dutton, author of Black and White Thinking, how natural selection has programmed us for lightning quick snap decisions and simplified categorisation of our world in order to survive. And he speaks to Professor Susan Neiman, author of Why Grow Up? About how difficult it can be to develop the skill of nuanced, critical thought, and how doing so may not just be an act of growing up, but as an act of resistance against a world designed to keep us infantilised, and our thinking simplistic. Show less