New Books in Neuroscience
177 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with Neuroscientists about their New Books
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Episodes
Dasha Kiper, "Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain" (Random House, 2023)
June 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIf you’ve ever worked with dementia patients before, you know how unique and bizarre the experience can be, and how little the stereotypes actually hold up to the experience. Even knowing about the diagnosis often does little to help us in caring for people, and many caregivers find themselves getting sucked into behavioral loops of their own. This is because your brain is not wired to deal with the altered form of reality that dementia patients inhabit. Evolution has not equipped us to deal ...
The Reality of Scientific Research: A Discussion with John W. Cave
June 10, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesIn this episode we speak with Dr. John W. Cave, a scientist and thought leader who has been in the research world for over 20 years. Dr. Cave has worked at a variety of elite research institutions at the intersection of biochemistry, neurology, and brain injury and has long history of mentoring younger scientists. Listen to our conversation for his insight into the reality of research in the sciences, from the complexity of grant writing to the management of institutional politics, and for hi...
Sharrona Pearl, "Do I Know You?: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
June 08, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating category of face recognition and the "the face recognition spectrum," which ranges from face blindness at one end to super recognition at the other. Super recognizers can recall faces from only the briefest exposure, while face blind people lack the capacity to recognize faces at all, including those of their closest loved ones. Informed by archival res...
The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourEric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory. In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has written several books for a general readership, including In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (...
Luis H. H. Favela, "The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment" (Routledge, 2024)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesEcological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not in classical cognitivist terms of the manipulation of representations in the head. This anti-representationalist stance, argues Luis Favela, makes ecological psychology deeply at odds with dominant trends in some parts of neuroscience. In The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment (Routledge, 2024), Favela lays o...
Christian Hansel, "Memory Makes the Brain: The Biological Machinery That Uses Experiences To Shape Individual Brains" (World Scientific, 2021)
April 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIf you're interested in memory, you'll find a lot in Memory Makes the Brain: The Biological Machinery That Uses Experiences To Shape Individual Brains (World Scientific, 2021), from cellular processes to unique and interesting perspectives on autism. Detailed descriptions of cellular processes involved in forming a memory. Connecting those cellular processes to everyday experiences - like the memorable image of a butterfly seen during a hike decades ago. Comparisons of plasticity in differ...
Charan Ranganath, "Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters" (Doubleday, 2024)
April 27, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters (Doubleday, 2024), pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and...
Matt Qvortrup, "The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics" (CEU Press, 2024)
April 24, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesIn this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Matt Qvortrup (Coventry University) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics (CEU Press, 2024). Putting the “science” back into political science, The Political Brain shows how fMRI-scans can identify differences between liberals and conservatives, can predict our behaviour, and can explain the biology of uprisings, revolutions...
Lawson R. Wulsin, "Toxic Stress: How Stress Is Making Us Ill and What We Can Do About It" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
April 15, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesOur stress response system is magnificent - it operates beneath our awareness, like an orchestra of organs playing a hidden symphony. When we are healthy, the orchestra plays effortlessly, but what happens when our bodies face chronic stress, and the music slips out of tune? The alarming rise of stress-related conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, and depression, show the price we're paying for our high-pressure living, while global warming, pandemics and technology have brought new k...
Max Bennett, "A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains" (Mariner Books, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks. Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neurosc...
Kenneth Miller, "Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep" (Hachette Books, 2023)
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutesWhy do we sleep? How can we improve our sleep? A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness. In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research particip...
Thomas Metzinger, "The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports" (MIT Press, 2024)
March 06, 2024 09:00 - 51 minutesWhat if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind. The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports (MIT Press, 2024)," influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first c...
Sten Grillner, "The Brain in Motion: From Microcircuits to Global Brain Function" (MIT Press, 2023)
February 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourC. S. Sherrington said “All the brain can do is to move things". The Brain in Motion: From Microcircuits to Global Brain Function (MIT Press, 2023) shows how much the brain can do "just" by moving things. It gives an amazing overview of the large variety of motor behaviors and the cellular basis of them. It reveals how motor circuits provide the underlying mechanism not just for walking or jumping, but also for breath or chewing. The book emphasizes the evolutionary perspective. It demonstrat...
Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesToday’s book is: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024), by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, a book that asks why stimulating jobs and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible, due to something called habituation. Because of habituation, people get used to dirty air, become unconcerned by their own misconduct, and bec...
Joshua Paul Dale, "Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World" (Profile Books, 2023)
February 10, 2024 09:00 - 34 minutesWhy are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters? Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. In Irresistible: How Cuteness...
Harry van der Hulst, "A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesHow does human language arise in the mind? To what extent is it innate, or something that is learned? How do these factors interact? The questions surrounding how we acquire language are some of the most fundamental about what it means to be human and have long been at the heart of linguistic theory. Harry van der Hulst's book A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a comprehensive introduction to this fascinating debate, unravelling the ar...
Lawrence Sherman and Dennis Plies, "Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesWhenever a person engages with music--when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or a wedding guest gets down on the dance floor--countless neurons are firing. Playing an instrument requires all of the resources of the nervous system, including cognitive, sensory, and motor functions. Composition and improvisation are remarkable demonstrations of the brain's capacity for creativity. Something as seemingly simple as listening to...
Shelly Kagan, "How to Count Animals, More Or Less" (Oxford UP, 2019)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesMost people agree that animals count morally, but how exactly should we take animals into account? A prominent stance in contemporary ethical discussions is that animals have the same moral status that people do, and so in moral deliberation the similar interests of animals and people should be given the very same consideration. In How to Count Animals, More Or Less (Oxford UP, 2019), Shelly Kagan sets out and defends a hierarchical approach in which people count more than animals do and som...
Coleen T. Murphy, "How We Age: The Science of Longevity" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 01, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesAll of us would like to live longer, or to slow the debilitating effects of age. In How We Age: The Science of Longevity (Princeton UP, 2023), Coleen Murphy shows how recent research on longevity and aging may be bringing us closer to this goal. Murphy, a leading scholar of aging, explains that the study of model systems, particularly simple invertebrate animals, combined with breakthroughs in genomic methods, have allowed scientists to probe the molecular mechanisms of longevity and aging. U...
The Future of Innovation: A Discussion with Min W. Jung
November 26, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesHumans have been so dominant on Earth in large part because of their capacity to innovate – but how does that work exactly? Why can they innovate so much? That issue has been studied by Professor Min W. Jung from the Center for Synaptic Brain Dysfunctions at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea. He is the author of A Brain for Innovation: The Neuroscience of Imagination and Abstract Thinking (Columbia UP, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jon...
Gary Tomlinson, "The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning" (Zone Books, 2023)
November 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in different ways. Some see meaning as a uniquely human achievement, others extend it to trees, microbes, and even to the bonding of DNA and RNA molecules. In this groundbreaking book, Gary Tomlinson defines a middle path. Combining emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs, he tracks mea...
Neil Cohn, "Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDrawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely th...
The Future of Paying Attention: A Discussion with Carolyn Dicey Jennings
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesIs it really harder to pay attention to something than it used to be? No doubt the world is getting faster, and social media platforms are so good at grabbing attention. But how real is the problem and in particular, does it impact our creativity? Carolyn Dicey Jennings is based at the University of California, Merced, and has just co-written a chapter called “Attention, Technology, and Creativity” in a book called Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses published by Columbi...
Joshua May, "Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIs free will an illusion? Is addiction a brain disease? Should we enhance our brains beyond normal? Neuroethics: Agency in the Age of Brain Science (Oxford UP, 2023) blends philosophical analysis with modern brain science to address these and other critical questions through captivating cases. The result is a nuanced view of human agency as surprisingly diverse and flexible. With a lively and accessible writing style, Neuroethics is an indispensable resource for students and scholars in both ...
Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)
October 01, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesScientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agen...
Federico Alvarez Igarzábal, "Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach" (Transcript, 2020)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesVideo games are temporal artifacts: They change with time as players interact with them in accordance with rules. In Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach (Transcript, 2020), Federico Alvarez Igarzábal investigates the formal aspects of video games that determine how these changes are produced and sequenced. Theories of time perception drawn from the cognitive sciences lay the groundwork for an in-depth analysis of these features, making for a comprehensive account of ...
Catherine Coveney et al., "Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
September 14, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesTechnosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences for our relationships to sleep, the values we accord sleep and the very nature and normativities of sleep itself. The authors discuss ho...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
The Future of Talking: A Discussion with Shane O'Mara
August 26, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesTalking is a defining part of what makes us human – we are almost constantly in dialogue but what purpose does all this conversation serve? Both for the individual and for society. And what is happening in our brains when we do it? Shane O Mara has been thinking about those questions for his book, Talking Heads: the New Science of How Conversation Shapes our Worlds (Jonathan Cape, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and w...
Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 17 minutesWhat links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist --part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation--describes Koch's search for an empirical e...
Infectious Behavior: Brain-Immune Connections in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Depression
August 14, 2023 18:26 - 16 minutesIn Infectious Behavior, neurobiologist Paul Patterson examines the involvement of the immune system in autism, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder. Although genetic approaches to these diseases have garnered the lion's share of publicity and funding, scientists are uncovering evidence of the important avenues of communication between the brain and the immune system and their involvement in mental illness. Patterson focuses on this brain-immune crosstalk, exploring the possibility tha...
Andreas Killen, "Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War" (Harper, 2023)
August 06, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesIn this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ. The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment o...
Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain
August 03, 2023 14:50 - 14 minutesImagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. Quian Quiroga studies the workings of the brain—in particular how memory works—one of the most complex and elusive mysteries of science. He and his fellow neuroscientists have at their disposal sophisticated imaging equipment and access to information not a...
The Future of Food: A Discussion with Kimberly Wilson
July 14, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesWe all know that as a nation our mental health is in crisis. But what most don't know is that a critical ingredient in this debate, and a crucial part of the solution - what we eat - is being ignored. Nutrition has more influence on what we feel, who we become and how we behave than we could ever have imagined. Listen to Kimberly Wilson speak with Owen Bennett-Jones discuss the connection between food and mental health. Wilson is the author of Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat Is Fuelling Our ...
Quinn Eastman, "The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness" (Columbia UP, 2023)
July 07, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesSleep was taking over Anna's life. Despite multiple alarm clocks and powerful stimulants, the young Atlanta lawyer could sleep for thirty or even fifty hours at a stretch. She stopped working and began losing weight because she couldn't stay awake long enough to eat. Anna's doctors didn't know how to help her until they tried an oddball drug, connected with a hunch that something produced by her body was putting her to sleep. The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Slee...
Stephen Hauser, "The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries: The Education of a Doctor" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesDr. Stephen L. Hauser and a patient named Andrea were both 27 years old when they met. He was an up-and-coming neurologist-in-training; she was a Harvard Law School graduate and White House aide whose brain was being ravaged by an explosive case of multiple sclerosis. It was the 1970s and Dr. Hauser had nothing to treat her with. She lost her ability to speak, swallow and breathe. At her bridal shower just before she was married, she was hooked up to a breathing tube and strapped in a wheelch...
The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable
June 20, 2023 12:52 - 7 minutesHumans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we ar...
Philip Kirby and Margaret J. Snowling, "Dyslexia: A History" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
June 03, 2023 08:00 - 16 minutesIn 1896 the British physician William Pringle Morgan published an account of “Percy,” a “bright and intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others of his age.” Yet, in spite of his intelligence, Percy had great difficulty learning to read. Percy was one of the first children to be described as having word-blindness, better known today as dyslexia. In Dyslexia: A History (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Philip Kirby and Margaret Snowling chart a journey that begins with Victorian...
The Miraculous Mind (with Paul Bloom)
May 11, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesPsychologist Paul Bloom and I talk about the human brain, morality, empathy, perversity, all the things—including Professor Bloom’s new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (Ecco Press, 2023). Culturally Jewish but in practice an atheist, Paul Bloom comes at the recurring theological questions familiar to the Almost Good Catholics audience from the materialistic perspective of psychology. Paul Bloom’s Yale faculty webpage Paul Bloom’s Toronto faculty webpage Paul Bloom’s Wikipedia page...
Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023)
April 26, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesAre science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question... Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spir...
Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem
April 25, 2023 19:35 - 14 minutesA discussion with the the author of Free Will (from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) and Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, Mark Balaguer, in which we discuss the scientific arguments for and against the possibility of free will. In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the cou...
Tom Hutton, "Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)
April 23, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesToward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's pa...
Moheb Costandi, "Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness" (MIT Press, 2022)
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesHow the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena. The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press...
Olaf Sporns on Network Neuroscience
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 13 minutesThe intersection between cutting-edge neuroscience and the emerging field of network science has been growing tremendously over the past decade. Olaf Sporns, editor of Network Neuroscience, and Distinguished Professor, Provost Professor of Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, discusses the applications of network science technology to neuroscience. Dr. Sporns hopes the launch of Network Neuroscience will contribute to the creation of a common langu...
Adrian Bejan, "Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies" (World Scientific, 2022)
February 26, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesPoets and philosophers are fascinated by time and beauty. They are two of our most visceral perceptions. In Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies (World Scientific, 2022), Adrian Bejan — a physicist — explains the scientific basis for the perception of time (“mind time”) and beauty. His is an evolutionary argument for understanding both perceptions, based on visual processing and change. To observe our immediate surroundings and to understand them faster is highly advantageous...
Making Meaning Episode 20: Love, Work, and Play
February 23, 2023 09:00 - 10 minutesThough life’s ultimate meaning may be elusive, the goods of love, work and play are so deeply rewarding that for most people they are sufficient for creating a happy life. And with new advances in neuroscience, we increasingly understand why that is at a molecular level. Guest: Paul Thagard is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author of many interdisciplinary books. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, where he founded and directed the Cog...
Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesWhat if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism ...
Christopher M. Palmer, "Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health" (Benbella Books, 2022)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesChristopher M. Palmer's book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health (Benbella Books, 2022) will forever change the way we understand and treat mental health. If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life. We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness? And why are mental health problems so hard to treat? Drawing on decades of research, Harvard ps...
David Lindsay, "Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words" (CSIRO Publishing, 2020)
December 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of David Lindsay, emeritus professor of the University of Western Australia. We talk about his book Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words (CSIRO Publishing, 2020) and how your hypothesis can save the communication of your research. David Lindsay : "It's quite unfortunate that we're training our undergraduates in science this way. I mean, undergraduates know that when they write something, for example, a protocol to be graded—undergraduates know that their professors ...
Mary-Frances O'Connor, "The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss" (HarperOne, 2022)
December 05, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesFor as long as humans have existed, we have struggled when a loved one dies. Poets and playwrights have written about the dark cloak of grief, the deep yearning, how devastating heartache feels. But until now, we have had little scientific perspective on this universal experience. In The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (HarperOne, 2022), neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallm...