Remove the micro-expressions, still the eyes, stretch the skin a little too tight, and your brain screams at you to run. This episode explores the uncanny valley, first mapped in 1970 by robotics professor Masahiro Mori and given its English name through a 1978 translation that accidentally linked it to Freud and Jentsch. The hosts explain Mori's graph of empathy collapsing just before full human likeness, the Repliee Q2 android experiment that showed overworked mirror neurons, and fMRI evidence of a prediction error in the parietal cortex.

The conversation digs into the evolutionary roots of the effect, including pathogen avoidance, mate selection and a 2009 macaque study showing monkeys avoid realistic 3D faces, then moves to the darker psychology of mortality salience, doppelgangers, Irvin Yalom's idea of specialness and the Capgras delu ...