New Books in Neuroscience: Recent Episodes
New Books Network
Interviews with Neuroscientists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Bookshop.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 communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Talking 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 writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
What 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 explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest--his instinctual (if "romantic") belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a "fringy" subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work--to uncover the roots of consciousness. Christof Koch is Professor of Biology and of Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He is the author of The Quest for Consciousness and other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In 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 that it may help us understand the causes of these common, but still mysterious, diseases. The heart of this engaging book, accessible to nonscientists, concerns the involvement of the immune systems of the pregnant woman and her fetus, and a consideration of maternal infection as a risk factor for schizophrenia and autism. Patterson reports on research that may shed light on today's autism epidemic. He also outlines the risks and benefits of both maternal and postnatal vaccinations. In the course of his discussion, Patterson offers a short history of immune manipulation in treating mental illness (recounting some frightening but fascinating early experiments) and explains how the immune system influences behavior and how the brain regulates the immune system, looking in particular at stress and depression. He examines the prenatal origins of adult disease and evidence for immune involvement in autism, schizophrenia, and depression. Finally, he describes the promise shown by recent animal experiments that have led to early clinical trials of postnatal and adult treatments for patients with autism and related disorders. Paul H. Patterson, a developmental neurobiologist, is Anne P. and Benjamin R. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and a Research Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. He is the coauthor (with Alan Brown) of The Origins of Schizophrenia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In 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 of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century. But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror. These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Imagine 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 available just twenty years ago. And yet Borges seemed to have imagined the gist of Quian Quiroga's discoveries decades before he made them. The title character of Borges's "Funes the Memorious" remembers everything in excruciatingly particular detail but is unable to grasp abstract ideas. Quian Quiroga found neurons in the human brain that respond to abstract concepts but ignore particular details, and, spurred by the way Borges imagined the consequences of remembering every detail but being incapable of abstraction, he began a search for the origins of Funes. Borges's widow, María Kodama, gave him access to her husband's personal library, and Borges's books led Quian Quiroga to reread earlier thinkers in philosophy and psychology. He found that just as Borges had perhaps dreamed the results of Quian Quiroga's discoveries, other thinkers—William James, Gustav Spiller, John Stuart Mill—had perhaps also dreamed a story like "Funes." With Borges and Memory, Quian Quiroga has given us a fascinating and accessible story about the workings of the brain that the great creator of Funes would appreciate. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a native of Argentina, is Professor and Director of the Bioengineering Research Centre at the University of Leicester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
We 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 Mental Health Crisis (W. H. Allen, 2023). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Sleep 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 Sleepiness (Columbia UP, 2023) tells Anna's story-and the broader story of her diagnosis, idiopathic hypersomnia (IH), a shadowy sibling of narcolepsy that has emerged as a focus of sleep research and patient advocacy. Quinn Eastman explores the science around sleepiness, recounting how researchers have been searching for more than a century for the substances that tip the brain into slumber. He argues that investigation of IH could unlock new understandings of how sleep is regulated and controlled. Eastman foregrounds the experiences of people with IH, relating how publicity around Anna's successful treatment helped others form a community. He shows how a group of patients who felt neglected or dismissed united to steer research toward their little-known disorder. Sharing emerging science and powerful stories, this book testifies to the significance of underrecognized diseases and sheds new light on how our brains function, day and night. It is essential reading for anyone interested in sleep and sleep disorders, including those affected by or seeking to treat them. Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Dr. 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 wheelchair so she wouldn’t slump over. Dr. Hauser was so moved by her case he decided to devote his career to MS research. The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries: The Education of a Doctor (St. Martin's Press, 2023) is a riveting memoir that chronicles Dr. Hauser’s 40-year quest to find a treatment for MS, the most common crippler of young adults and a disease that affects millions worldwide. Despite enormous pushback from his field, Dr. Hauser discovered a new culprit for MS, ultimately transforming our understanding of the disease and resulting in the development of a new drug that has dramatically improved the lives of thousands of MS patient. Dr. Hauser, director of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco, describes a colorful cast of characters who played roles in his upbringing and in his development as a tenacious researcher and compassionate physician. He provides moving stories of patients whose courage and optimism in the face of a debilitating illness were instrumental to the advances made in the fight against MS. Over the course of his journey, Dr. Hauser met resistance from experts at the National Institutes of Health, who called his ideas “biologically implausible,” and the Food and Drug Administration, which put such strict limits on a critical proof-of-concept study he feared it was doomed to fail. Then, when victory finally seemed within reach, corporate takeovers threatened to scuttle the whole effort. The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries is an inspiring, highly readable story that highlights the interplay between basic science and patient care and its crucial role in the quest for new medicines that fight disease and improve our lives. Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. His story about Dr. Hauser’s research was published in STAT in March, 1917, when the drug based on the research was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Humans 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 are evolutionary outliers. The human brain was not singled out to become amazing in its own exclusive way, and it never stopped being a primate brain. If we are not an exception to the rules of evolution, then what is the source of the human advantage? Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors' invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex—the part of the brain responsible for finding patterns, reasoning, developing technology, and passing it on through culture. Herculano-Houzel shows us how she came to these conclusions—making “brain soup” to determine the number of neurons in the brain, for example, and bringing animal brains in a suitcase through customs. The Human Advantage is an engaging and original look at how we became remarkable without ever being special. Suzana Herculano-Houzel is Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In 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 medicine and continues to dyslexia’s current status as the most globally recognized specific learning difficulty. In an engaging narrative style, Kirby and Snowling tell the story of dyslexia, examining its origins and revealing the many scientists, teachers, and campaigners who put it on the map. Through this history they explain current debates over the diagnosis of dyslexia and its impact on learning.For those who have lived experience of dyslexia, professionals who have supported them, and scholars of social history, education, psychology, and childhood studies, Dyslexia reflects on the place of literacy in society – whom it has benefited, and whom it has left behind. Philip Kirby is lecturer in social science, King’s College London. Margaret J. Snowling is professor of psychology, University of Oxford, and president of St John’s College. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Why is it so difficult to adopt a more sustainable way of life, even when convinced of the urgency of the environmental crisis? If adopting new behaviors beneficial for the environment is so challenging at the individual level, no wonder it is even harder at the community or governmental levels. Seeing individual and collective behaviors not changing, or not rapidly enough, eventually leads to the belief that nothing can be done and that human beings are just “hard-wired” that way. This is where, quite unexpectedly, neuroscience can help us tackle the multidimensional and unprecedented problem that is the environmental crisis. In Minding the Climate: How Neuroscience Can Help Solve Our Environmental Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Ann-Christine Duhaime argues that by considering the long evolutionary history of the human brain and its reward-system, one can better understand, and therefore grow less frustrated about, why adopting sustainable behaviors can be so challenging. “Our brains are amazing," writes Dr. Duhaime, "– fine-tuned, capable, adaptable, to handle the incredible tasks of human life in its infinite variety and with its infinite day-to-day challenges. […] But there is a mismatch between the pace of evolution of this extraordinary able, pulsating, three-pound bundle of sparks and what we need to meet the challenge of this extraordinary rapid Age of the Anthropocene.” It is this mismatch that Dr. Duhaime proposes to analyze in this surprising book. Using insights provided by research at the intersection of neuroscience, environmental sciences and a number of other fields, Minding the Climate invites us to think about what a “sustainable brain” might look like and how to achieve it. Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
A taken-for-granted miracle occurs in doctors’ offices across the world every single day. With only a stethoscope and an inflatable cuff, a physician can check your blood pressure to predict your risk of future heart problems. These tools give you the chance to take proactive steps to reduce this risk if needed. Why don’t we have similar tools for the brain? A Stethoscope for the Brain: Preventive Approaches to Protect the Mind (New Degree Press, 2022) is a book about proactive strategies to prevent brain diseases. Blending the stories of people affected by brain disease with the science that saves patients’ lives, neuroscientist Ayan Mandal invites readers to learn about the future of brain health.
This book tells the stories of...
A sisterhood of Catholic nuns who taught the world the secret to preventing dementia
The French patient whose legacy guides our ability to treat strokes early
Military veterans whose routine checkups led to a discovery that could prevent the most common cause of disability in young adults
New advances in medicine are proving that maladies of the mind are not inevitable. Learn what can be done to protect the brains of you and your loved ones. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what's left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems--the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett--identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"--harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity--the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone's curiosity. Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (MIT Press, 2022) performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate--to be curious with the book and not simply about it. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (Mariner Books, 2020), Feldman reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a “lizard brain” and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior. Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature—a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.is among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. She is the author of two books How Emotions are Made, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. In addition, Dr. Barrett has published over 260 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She has also given two popular TED talks one of which has over 6.5 million views. Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Entering the world of psychedelic drugs can be challenging, and many aren't sure where to start. As research continues to expand and legalization looms on the horizon for psychedelics like psilocybin, you may need a guide to navigate what psychedelics are, how they work, and their potential benefits and risks. The Psychedelic Handbook: A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and DMT/Ayahuasca (Ulysses Press, 2022) is a complete manual that is accessible to anyone with an interest in these "mind-manifesting" substances. Packed with information on psilocybin, LSD, DMT/ayahuasca, mescaline/peyote, ketamine, MDMA, ibogaine, 5-methoxy-DMT ("the toad"), and Salvia divinorum/salvinorin A, this book is your ultimate reference for understanding the science and history of psychedelics; discovering their potential to treat depression, PTSD, substance abuse, and other disorders, as well as to increase wellness, creativity, and meditation; learning how to safely trip and explaining what we know about microdosing; and recognizing and caring for negative reactions to psychedelics. Clinical research psychiatrist, founding figure of the American psychedelic research renaissance, and best-selling author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Dr. Rick Strassman shares his experience and perspectives as neither advocate nor foe of psychedelics in order to help readers understand the effects of these remarkable drugs. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Biomedical research using various animal species and in vitro cellular systems has resulted in both major successes and translational failure. In Model Systems in Biology: History, Philosophy, and Practical Concerns (MIT Press, 2022), comparative neurobiologist Georg Striedter examines how biomedical researchers have used animal species and in vitro cellular systems to understand and develop treatments for human diseases ranging from cancer and polio to Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Although there have been some major successes, much of this “translational” research on model systems has failed to generalize to humans. Striedter explores the history of such research, focusing on the models used and considering the question of model selection from a variety of perspectives—the philosophical, the historical, and that of practicing biologists. Striedter reviews some philosophical concepts and ethical issues, including concerns over animal suffering and the compromises that result. He traces the history of the most widely used animal and in vitro models, describing how they compete with one another in a changing ecosystem of models. He examines how therapies for bacterial and viral infections, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological disorders have been developed using animal and cell culture models—and how research into these diseases has both taken advantage of and been hindered by model system differences. Finally, Striedter argues for a “big tent” biology, in which a diverse set of models and research strategies can coexist productively. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of John Measey, Researcher at the Centre for Invasion Biology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. We talk about the needs of early-career researchers and also about our need for early-career researchers. John Measey : "What we really need to know is what a scientific journal is for and what we want it to be for. So, we know, more or less, what it was for and where it came from, but what do we want that to be in the twenty-first century, and how will the journal meet rigor, independence, transparency, and replicability? Because we have a lot more potential now than we've ever had before for making knowledge available, so this means that every single publication that's out there, every piece of scientific work — all of it can be used not only one time by one scientist, but again and again and again by all scientists today and to come. So the question here is, How do we want that to be presented? I don't think that we should lose that interpretive manuscript, that (as we call it) journal paper, because it really gives us the insight of what the people who conducted that research did and what they think about what they did. That is a historical document of the time. But I want to ask too: What else can we get that will really make that paper so much more valuable going on into the future? Let's make the data available, let's make the script for the analysis available, let's make the code available — and there's so much more, because these days scientists are producing so much more digital content. So what do we want journals to do, and how do we want them to interact with this availability, with this big data?" Read and use How to Publish in Biological Sciences Read and use How to Write a PhD in Biological Sciences Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
If you have ever been skeptical about whether neuroscience has anything to teach psychoanalysis, or vice-versa, you will be stimulated by this book which engages the two disciplines in a fascinating dialogue with each other. How does the mind connect to the body? Why does it feel like something to be us? For one of the boldest thinkers in neuroscience, solving this puzzle has been a lifetime's quest. Now at last, the man who discovered the brain mechanism for dreaming appears to have made a breakthrough. The very idea that a solution is at hand may seem outrageous. Isn't consciousness intangible, beyond the reach of science? Yet Mark Solms shows how misguided fears and suppositions have concealed its true nature. Stick to the medical facts, pay close attention to the eerie testimony of hundreds of neurosurgery patients, and a way past our obstacles reveals itself. Join Solms on a voyage into the extraordinary realms beyond. More than just a philosophical argument, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Norton, 2021) will forever alter how you understand your own experience. There is a secret buried in the brain's ancient foundations: bring it into the light and we fathom all the depths of our being. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches (Ecco, 3033), Daniel Bergner examines these and other by describing three riveting case studies in the context of the history of psychiatry and psychopharmacology. Alongside the story of his brother Bob’s struggle with bipolar disorder, we learn about Caroline, who is besieged by the hallucinations of psychosis, and David, an attorney who is engulfed by anxiety and depression. In telling their stories while describing the frontiers of brain research, Bergner shows how the pharmaceutical industry has played a key role in perpetuating a biological view of the mind and drug-based cures for its disorders – despite mediocre drug effectiveness, many challenging side effects, and questionable patient outcomes. The Mind and the Moon addresses fundamental issues of selfhood and identity in ways that will challenge basic beliefs about who we are and who we might be. Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at steve@stevebeitler.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon--a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. It debunked the primacy of the IQ test and inspired new approaches to education; entire curricula, schools, museums, and parents' guides were dedicated to the nurturing of the several intelligences. In his new book, A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory (MIT Press, 2022), Gardner reflects on his intellectual development and his groundbreaking work, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Plan S: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research. Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells's book Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed. (Ubiquity Press, 2022) tells the story of open access publishing - why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientific knowledge - and public trust in science is under threat. On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative known as 'Plan S' was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitudes towards open access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules on the publication of research, with the aim of one day making all research free and available to all. What followed was a debate of global proportions, as stakeholders asked: Who has the right to access publicly-funded research? Will it ever be possible to enforce change on a multi-billion dollar market dominated by five major players? Here, the scheme's founder, Robert-Jan Smits, makes a compelling case for Open Access, and reveals for the first time how he set about turning his controversial plan into reality - as well as some of the challenges faced along the way. In telling his story, Smits argues that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the traditional academic publishing system as unsustainable. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
As a trainee doctor, A. J. Lees was enthralled by his mentors: esteemed neurologists who combined the precision of mathematicians, the scrupulosity of entomologists, and the solemnity of undertakers in their diagnoses and treatments. For them, there was no such thing as an unexplained symptom or psychosomatic problem--no difficult cases, just interesting ones--and it was only a matter of time before all disorders of the brain would be understood in terms of anatomical, electrical, and chemical connections. Today, this kind of "holistic neurology" is on the brink of extinction as a slavish adherence to protocols and algorithms--plus a worship of machines--runs the risk of destroying the key foundational clinical skills of listening, observation, and imagination that have been at the heart of the discipline for more than 150 years. In Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology (Notting Hill Editions, 2022), Lees takes us on a kind of Sherlock Holmes tour of neurology, giving the reader insight into--and a defense of--the deep analytical tools that the best neurologists still rely on to diagnose patients: to heal minds and to fix brains. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices--or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical. The story of how we came to understand electricity's essential role in all life is rooted in our observations of its influences on the body--influences governed by the body's central nervous system. Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life (Princeton UP, 2021) explains the science of electricity from this fresh, biological perspective. Through vivid tales of scientists and individuals--from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk--Timothy Jorgensen shows how our views of electricity and the nervous system evolved in tandem, and how progress in one area enabled advancements in the other. He explains how these developments have allowed us to understand--and replicate--the ways electricity enables the body's essential functions of sight, hearing, touch, and movement itself. Throughout, Jorgensen examines our fascination with electricity and how it can help or harm us. He explores a broad range of topics and events, including the Nobel Prize-winning discoveries of the electron and neuron, the history of experimentation involving electricity's effects on the body, and recent breakthroughs in the use of electricity to treat disease. Filled with gripping adventures in scientific exploration, Spark offers an indispensable look at electricity, how it works, and how it animates our lives from within and without. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
When people describe the brain they often compare it to a computer. In fact, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has defined the field for decades now. And in many ways, it works – the are many respects in which the brain is like a computer. But there are other aspects of the brain which are not captured by the computer metaphor which is why the neuroscientist Daniel Graham is suggesting another paradigm for understanding the brain. In his book An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works (Columbia UP, 2021), he argues that the brain is a communication system, like the internet. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Few substances have been researched as extensively, and debated as fiercely, as cannabis. In Marijuana on My Mind: The Science and Mystique of Cannabis (Cambridge University Press, 2022), psychiatrist Timmen Cermak offers a balanced, science-based analysis of how marijuana affects people physiologically, psychologically, and spiritually. Cermak draws on current understandings of the brain and nervous system to describe how cannabis achieves its effects as well as how it can pose risks to some individuals. Cermak believes that most people can enjoy cannabis safely as long as they apply sensible guidelines and precautions. Far different in tone from the heated polemics that cannabis can inspire, Marijuana on My Mind is a deeply informed assessment of what we know about cannabis and how people can deploy that knowledge wisely. Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at steve@stevebeitler.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain. This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned cognitive psychologist Stephen Kosslyn about how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced, or didn't influence, our understanding of the learning process. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Are humans the only dreamers on Earth? What goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2022) brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming. It shows that dreams provide an invaluable window into the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, giving us access to a seemingly inaccessible realm of animal experience. David Peña-Guzmán uncovers evidence of animal dreaming throughout the scientific literature, suggesting that many animals run “reality simulations” while asleep, with a dream-ego moving through a dynamic and coherent dreamscape. He builds a convincing case for animals as conscious beings and examines the thorny scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions it raises. Once we accept that animals dream, we incur a host of moral obligations and have no choice but to rethink our views about who animals are and the interior lives they lead. A mesmerizing journey into the otherworldly domain of nonhuman consciousness, When Animals Dream carries profound implications for contemporary debates about animal cognition, animal ethics, and animal rights, challenging us to regard animals as beings who matter, and for whom things matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to renowned UC San Diego neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland about the importance of communicating science, the wonders of the biological world and the dangers of wishful thinking. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures (Princeton UP, 2021) is an expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better. Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot. How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Dashun Wang, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University, and also with Albert-László Barabási, Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University. We talk about their new book The Science of Science" (Cambridge UP, 2021) and science, squared. Albert-László Barabási : "There is, of course, the need that you grow professionally. If you're a mathematician, you need to perfect your math. If you're a physicist, you need to do your physics. If you're a biologist, you need to develop your lab techniques. But no matter the magnitude of any discovery you might make, it's not impactful unless you can actually communicate it. And I think that this is where science lacks significantly. I would even go so far as to say, there is a counter-selection: People who are not necessarily the best communicators tend to prefer science because there's the impression that that is not the skill that you need — you just need to be able to solve problems in a meaningful way. But if you're not able to write your ideas down, if you're not able to share your ideas with your community, then it's really as if you didn't have the ideas at all. And you know, I have experienced this in my own career. When I got interested in network science back in 1994/95, for the first few years my papers got rejected one after the other, and not because it wasn't good science (as I would later realize) — no, my papers were getting rejected because I could not communicate to the community at large and to my referees in particular why we should care about networks. And it took me about five years to find the way into people's minds, to learn how they write papers about networks. I needed to learn the hard way about how the community of scientists appreciated and did not appreciate research on networks. And it took me so long because I'd never been offered the opportunity to study the communication of science." Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The human brain undergoes massive changes during its development, from early childhood and the teenage years to adulthood and old age. Across a wide range of species, from C. elegans and fruit flies to mice, monkeys, and humans, information about brain connectivity (connectomes) at different stages is now becoming available. New approaches in network neuroscience can be used to analyze the topological, spatial, and dynamical organization of such connectomes. In Changing Connectomes: Evolution, Development, and Dynamics in Network Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2020), Marcus Kaiser provides an up-to-date overview of the field of connectomics and introduces concepts and mechanisms underlying brain network changes during evolution and development. Drawing on a range of results from experimental, clinical, and computational studies, Kaiser describes changes during healthy brain maturation and during brain network disorders (including such neurodevelopmental conditions as schizophrenia and depression), brain injury, and neurodegenerative disorders including dementia. He argues that brain stimulation is an area where understanding connectome development could help in assessing the long-term effects of interventions. Changing Connectomes is a suitable starting point for researchers who are new to the field of connectomics, and also for researchers who are interested in the link between brain network organization and brain and cognitive development in health and disease. Matlab/Octave code examples available at the MIT Press website will allow computational neuroscience researchers to understand and extend the shown mechanisms of connectome development. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The accusation “you’re deluded” is often used as something of a cheap shot intended to silence an opponent in debate. But what is the nature of a delusion and how can we assess rationality and irrationality? In this podcast, Owen Bennett-Jones talks to Professor Lisa Bortolotti who studies the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry at Birmingham University and is the author of among many other things, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (Oxford UP, 2010) and most recently edited Delusions in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
For half a century we have been trained to believe that our right brain hemisphere is our emotional brain, while our left brain houses our rational thinking. Now neuroscience shows that it's not that simple: in fact, our emotional limbic tissue is evenly divided between our two hemispheres. Consequently, each hemisphere has both an emotional brain and a thinking brain. In this groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presents these four distinct modules of cells as four characters that make up who we are: Character 1, Left Thinking; Character 2, Left Emotion; Character 3, Right Emotion; and Character 4, Right Thinking. Everything we think, feel, or do is dependent upon brain cells to perform that function. Since each of the Four Characters stems from specific groups of cells that feel unique inside of our body, they each display particular skills, feel specific emotions, or think distinctive thoughts. In Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our Life (Hay House, 2021),Dr. Taylor shows us how to get acquainted with our own Four Characters, observe how they show up in our daily life, and learn to identify and relate to them in others as well. And she introduces a practice called the Brain Huddle--a tool for bringing our Four Characters into conversation with one another so we can tap their respective strengths and choose which one to embody in any situation. The more we become familiar with each of the characters in ourselves and others, the more power we gain over our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, and our lives. Indeed, we discover that we have the power to choose who and how we want to be in every moment. And when our Four Characters work together and balance one another as a whole brain, we gain a radical new road map to deep inner peace. Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2022), we talk about writing when it's a verb, we talk about writing when it's a choice, and we talk about writing when it's the science. Stephen Heard : "Especially for early-career scientists there's a risk of their writing entering into a positive feedback loop with the writing as it is in the literature. And really, we do this to them, we professors and instructors. We say, 'Next week, you're going to hand in a lab report. Write out this experiment you did,' and we say, quote, 'and write like the scientific literature,' unquote. Well, that's a horrible thing to tell anyone to do, because unfortunately, much of our literature isn't particularly well written. We love our acronyms, we love really long noun phrases, we love the passive voice, and so on. And so, people who don't make conscious choices and just sort of model what they're writing on what's already out there — I think they sort of get locked into some of those bad decisions, like the five-noun noun phrase. So being aware of what you're doing, thinking about the language you're using, and being willing to use the language to its fullest — that's not an invitation to write your own Finnegans Wake — but it is an invitation to think carefully about the way of constructing your point that will resonate best with the reader." Readers may be interested in Heard's webpage for the book. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Today’s episode of How To Be Wrong welcomes Glenn Sauer, who is Donald J. Ross Sr. Chair in Biology and Biochemistry and Professor of Biology at Fairfield University, where he also serves as Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences. Our conversation covers a range of topics related to the issue of intellectual humility, including the conflict between scientific and religious perspectives in the US and the politics of certainty that dominates much contemporary discourse about policy as well as ideas about being right or wrong. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
What makes a living body conscious? What is consciousness and are there different types of it? These questions have been studied by Professor Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Much of her early work was on epigenetic inheritance which poses questions such as whether learned behaviour can be passed on from one generation to the next and that has led her to think about whether it’s possible to take an evolutionary approach to consciousness. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing—often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes—to reflect the interests of the groups you belong to. In The Power of Us (Little Brown, Spark, 2021), psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how to harness its dynamic nature to:
-
Boost cooperation and productivity
-
Overcome bias
-
Escape from echo chambers
-
Break political gridlock
-
Foster dissent and mobilize for change
-
Lead effectively
-
Galvanize action to address persistent global problems
Along the way, they explore such seemingly unrelated phenomena as why a small town in Germany spent decades divided by shoes, why beliefs persist after they are disproven, how working together synchronizes our brains, what makes selfish people generous, why effective leaders say “we” a lot, and how playing soccer can reduce age-old conflicts. Understanding how identity works allows people to take control, moving beyond wondering, “Who am I?” to answer instead, “Who do I want to be?” Packed with fascinating insights, vivid case studies, and a wealth of pioneering research, The Power of Us will change the way you understand yourself—and the people around you—forever. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Change Your World (Henry Holt, 2022) is a journey through the cutting-edge science of how our mindset shapes every facet of our lives, revealing how your brain holds the keys to unlocking a better you. What you believe can make it so. You’ve heard of the placebo effect and how sugar pills can accelerate healing. But did you know that sham heart surgeries often work just as well as placing real stents? Or that people who think they’re particularly prone to cardiovascular disease are four times as likely to die from cardiac arrest? Such is the power and deadly importance of the expectation effect―how what we think will happen changes what does happen. Melding neuroscience with narrative, science journalist David Robson takes readers on a deep dive into the many life zones the expectation effect permeates. We see how people who believe stress is beneficial become more creative when placed under strain. We see how associating aging with wisdom can add seven plus years to your life. People say seeing is believing but, over and over, Robson proves that the converse is truer: believing is seeing. Sine Yaganoglu Having trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer, I switched to industry following my PhD at ETH Zurich and have been working in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Many people, at some stage of their life, worry about sleep: are they getting enough of it? Or even, too much? Derk-Jan Dijk is Professor of Sleep and Physiology at University of Surrey. His current research interests include the contribution of sleep to brain function in healthy ageing and dementia; the role of circadian rhythms in sleep regulation; negative effects of sleep loss; understanding age and sex related differences in sleep physiology and developing tests to monitor sleep. In this podcast he discusses these issues and the future direction of the discipline with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) delves into an under-researched and little understood but extremely pertinent issue in law; the prevalence of neurodisability within criminal justice systems. Considering the challenges faced by both juveniles and adults with neuorodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system, a host of interdisciplinary international scholars examine the issue from multiple perspectives; from that of lawyers, magistrates, and through the lens of therapeutic and legal analysis, this contribution offers suggestions for reform of both legislation and practice. The book makes the case that criminal justice systems lack the accommodations required both within the institution and the community to adequately support those with neurodisabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system. In this conversation, with one of the co-editors of the book, Anna Eriksson, we cover a broad range of ground - from the ways in which resources could be reallocated to better address issues of community safety, to how better with neurodisabilities may be better supported in a practical basis to bring more just, equitable and humane outcomes. This is an important book for criminal lawyers, policy makers, criminologists and members of the public who wish to understand and challenge the barriers that people with neurodisabilities face, not just as a result of the criminal justice system but on a day-to-day basis. Gaye T. Lansdell is an Associate Professor in The Faculty of Law at Monash University. Bernadette J Saunders is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. Anna Eriksson is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Monash University. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at INSERM and Editor-in-Chief of eNeuro. We talk about the review process, about education in the sciences, and again a little bit more about education in the sciences. Christophe Bernard : "Science is everything that a scientist does. But for many people, science is only the bench work — to them, that's what a scientist really does. And the publishing part — well, that's just something that others do. Even the review process, for too many people, is just not fully integrated into the work that scientists are doing. But there should not be a barrier between doing science and reviewing science. It should be the same world — a continuity between the two. Now, in institutions, they focus all their efforts on teaching people how to do science. But doing science also is knowing how to review a paper. Perhaps you know, but there is a crisis in the reviewing process. Many authors have commented on being mistreated by reviewers, and although there'll be many reasons why that happens, the main reason is that we are not taught how to review a paper. And this just leads to frustration, or worse, because when you're an author and you submit a paper and you receive comments which are aggressive and do not make sense and are just plain unhelpful, then you start to distrust the system." Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: the very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds. Here are gripping accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake. A college student cannot remember if she has eaten breakfast. By dinner, she is strapped to a hospital bed, convinced she is battling zombies. A man planning to propose marriage instead becomes violently enraged, gripped by body spasms so severe that he nearly bites off his own tongue. One after another, poor farmers in South Carolina drop dead from a mysterious epidemic of dementia. With an intoxicating blend of history and intrigue, Sara Manning Peskin invites readers to play medical detective, tracing each diagnosis from the patient to an ailing nervous system. Along the way, Peskin entertains with tales of the sometimes outlandish, often criticized, and forever devoted scientists who discovered it all. Peskin never loses sight of the human impact of these conditions. Alzheimer's Disease is more than the gradual loss of a loved one; it can be a family's multigenerational curse. The proteins that abound in every cell of our bodies are not simply strings of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; they are the building blocks of our personalities and relationships. A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain (Norton, 2022) is an unputdownable journey into the deepest mysteries of our brains. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, cofounders of Retraction Watch. We talk about lots of things, retracting very few. Ivan Oransky : "Accountability in science certainly does not come down to only retracting papers, because there are just lots of issues. And by the way, just to remind everyone, science is very much a human endeavor. It doesn't exist outside of humans doing the science. I mean, facts exist, and there is truth out there, and we'd very much appear to be getting close and closer to it — that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the actual process, like, how do we learn these things. How — as this podcast more generally looks at — how does knowledge get known. Basically, epistemology. But that requires human beings. It requires human beings interpreting, talking and listening, collaborating, and so that's one part of science that is really critical. Therefore, of course, the issue of accountability is multifactorial." The Retraction Watch database is here. You might also be interested in this article: "Repeat Offenders: When Scientific Fraudsters Slip Through the Cracks." You can learn more about retraction here. Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Today I talked to Leonard Mdlodinow about his new book Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking (Pantheon, 2022). "On or around December 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf memorably wrote, citing the rise of Modernism. Take things ahead a century, and Leonard Mdlodinow is making a similarly striking statement that advances in how neuroscientists can trace the connectivity of neurons has led to another striking advancement in intellectual life since approximately 2010. From the 1980s until that date, psychologists and neuroscientists were both appreciating and refining the concept of emotions as inherited from Charles Darwin. Since then, what emotions are and how they operate has undergone a conceptual revolution. This episode follows Mlodinow’s guidance as he outlines how scientists today focus on emotions as functional agents, thoroughly emmeshed in how we selectively perceive and adapt to the circumstances we find ourselves in. One tangible example of the revolution: now we know that childhood can literally change our DNA as we react and adjust to emotionally-laden experiences that leave their emotional fingerprint on us all. Leonard Mlodinow received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and has been on the faculty at CalTech. His previous, award-winning books include two written with Stephen Hawking, and another written with Deepak Chopra. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Elaborately conceived, grandly constructed insane asylums—ranging in appearance from classical temples to Gothic castles—were once a common sight looming on the outskirts of American towns and cities. Many of these buildings were razed long ago, and those that remain stand as grim reminders of an often cruel system. For much of the nineteenth century, however, these asylums epitomized the widely held belief among doctors and social reformers that insanity was a curable disease and that environment—architecture in particular—was the most effective means of treatment. In The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (U Minnesota Press, 2007), Carla Yanni tells a compelling story of therapeutic design, from America’s earliest purpose—built institutions for the insane to the asylum construction frenzy in the second half of the century. At the center of Yanni’s inquiry is Dr. Thomas Kirkbride, a Pennsylvania-born Quaker, who in the 1840s devised a novel way to house the mentally diseased that emphasized segregation by severity of illness, ease of treatment and surveillance, and ventilation. After the Civil War, American architects designed Kirkbride-plan hospitals across the country. Before the end of the century, interest in the Kirkbride plan had begun to decline. Many of the asylums had deteriorated into human warehouses, strengthening arguments against the monolithic structures advocated by Kirkbride. At the same time, the medical profession began embracing a more neurological approach to mental disease that considered architecture as largely irrelevant to its treatment. Generously illustrated, The Architecture of Madness is a fresh and original look at the American medical establishment’s century-long preoccupation with therapeutic architecture as a way to cure social ills. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have―older than language. In Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation (Norton, 2022), Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Kemp describes the brain regions that orient us in space and the specialized neurons that do it. Place cells. Grid cells. He examines how the brain plans routes, recognizes landmarks, and makes sure we leave a room through a door instead of trying to leave through a painting. From the secrets of supernavigators like the indigenous hunters of the Bolivian rainforest to the confusing environments inhabited by people with place blindness, Kemp charts the myriad ways in which we find our way and explains the cutting-edge neuroscience behind them. How did Neanderthals navigate? Why do even seasoned hikers stray from the trail? What spatial skills do we inherit from our parents? How can smartphones and our reliance on GPS devices impact our brains? In engaging, engrossing language, Kemp unravels the mysteries of navigating and links the brain’s complex functions to the effects that diseases like Alzheimer’s, types of amnesia, and traumatic brain injuries have on our perception of the world around us. A book for anyone who has ever felt compelled to venture off the beaten path, Dark and Magical Places is a stirring reminder of the beauty in losing yourself to your surroundings. And the beauty in understanding how our brains can guide us home. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being. To experience the Upper Paleolithic era—a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment—the age of reason and the end of the soul—Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (Metropolitan Books, 2021) is one man’s audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth—and thrive. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In 1948, the World Health Organization began to prepare its social psychiatry project, which aimed to discover the epidemiology and arrive at a classification of mental disorders. In Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization (MIT Press, 2021), Harry Y-Jui Wu examines the WHO's ambitious project, arguing that it was shaped by the postwar faith in technology and expertise and the universalizing vision of a “world psyche.” Wu shows that the WHO's idealized scientific internationalism laid the foundations for today's highly metricalized global mental health system. Examining the interactions between the WHO and developing countries, Wu offers an analysis of the “transnationality” of mental health. He examines knowledge-sharing between the organization and African and Latin American collaborators, and looks in detail at the WHO's selection of a Taiwanese scientist, Tsung-yi Lin, to be its medical officer and head of the social psychiatry project. He discusses scientists' pursuit of standardization—not only to synchronize sectors in the organization but also to produce a common language of psychiatry—and how technological advances supported this. Wu considers why the optimism and idealism of the social psychiatry project turned to dissatisfaction, reappraising the WHO's early knowledge production modality through the concept of an “export processing zone.” Finally, he looks at the WHO's project in light of current debates over psychiatry and global mental health, as scientists shift their concerns from the creation of universal metrics to the importance of local matrixes. Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Associate Professor in the Cross College Elite Program and Department of Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan. Kelvin Chan is a PhD Candidate at McGill University. His PhD dissertation focuses on the history of psychiatry and mental health care in colonial Hong Kong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
It is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involves an array of complaints including brain damage, the authors present compelling evidence that mass psychogenic illness was the cause of “Havana Syndrome.” This mysterious condition that has baffled experts is explored across 11-chapters which offer insights by a prominent neurologist and an expert on psychogenic illness. A lively and enthralling read, the authors explore the history of similar scares from the 18th century belief that sounds from certain musical instruments were harmful to human health, to 19th century cases of “telephone shock,” and more contemporary panics involving people living near wind turbines that have been tied to a variety of health complaints. The authors provide dozens of examples of kindred episodes of mass hysteria throughout history, in addition to psychosomatic conditions and even the role of insects in triggering outbreaks. Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria (Copernicus, 2020), is a scientific detective story and a case study in the social construction of mass psychogenic illness. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
For decades, some of our best and brightest medical scientists have dedicated themselves to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. What happened? Where is the cure? The biggest breakthroughs occurred twenty-five years ago, with little progress since. In How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer's (MIT Press, 2021), neurobiologist Karl Herrup explains why the Alzheimer's discoveries of the 1990s didn't bear fruit and maps a direction for future research. Herrup describes the research, explains what's taking so long, and offers an approach for resetting future research. Herrup offers a unique insider's perspective, describing the red flags that science ignored in the rush to find a cure. He is unsparing in calling out the stubbornness, greed, and bad advice that has hamstrung the field, but his final message is a largely optimistic one. Herrup presents a new and sweeping vision of the field that includes a redefinition of the disease and a fresh conceptualization of aging and dementia that asks us to imagine the brain as a series of interconnected neighborhoods. He calls for changes in virtually every aspect of the Alzheimer's disease research effort, from the drug development process, to the mechanisms of support for basic research, to the often-overlooked role of the scientific media, and more. With How Not to Study a Disease, Herrup provides a roadmap that points us in a new direction in our journey to a cure for Alzheimer's. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Ayelet Baram-Tsabari. We talk about the accessibility of science using Google to scholars and students in languages beyond English and how scholars can de-jargonize their research to ensure increase their reach. Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Why does a clarinet play at lower pitches than a flute? What does it mean for sounds to be in or out of tune? How are emotions carried by music? Do other animals perceive sound like we do? How might a musician use math to come up with new ideas? This book offers a lively exploration of the mathematics, physics, and neuroscience that underlie music in a way that readers without scientific background can follow. David Sulzer, also known in the musical world as Dave Soldier, explains why the perception of music encompasses the physics of sound, the functions of the ear and deep-brain auditory pathways, and the physiology of emotion. He delves into topics such as the math by which musical scales, rhythms, tuning, and harmonies are derived, from the days of Pythagoras to technological manipulation of sound waves. Sulzer ranges from styles from around the world to canonical composers to hip-hop, the history of experimental music, and animal sound by songbirds, cetaceans, bats, and insects. He makes accessible a vast range of material, helping readers discover the universal principles behind the music they find meaningful. Written for musicians and music lovers with any level of science and math proficiency, including none, Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music (Columbia UP, 2021) demystifies how music works while testifying to its beauty and wonder. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Free Will: An Investigation is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Alfred Mele, the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. This wide-ranging conversation examines free will and the different notions of free will that exist, the connections of free will with developments in neuroscience, social psychology and public opinion polls and Alfred Mele’s key concern about how current and future insights might be directly applied to improve our world. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
From adrenaline to dopamine, most of us are familiar with the chemicals that control us. They are the hormones and neurotransmitters that our brains run on, and Overloaded: How Every Aspect of Your Life is Influenced by Your Brain Chemicals (Bloomsbury, 2021) looks at the role they play in every aspect of our lives, from what we remember, how we make decisions and who we love to basic survival drives such as hunger, fear and sleep. Author Ginny Smith gets to the bottom of exactly what these tiny molecules do. What role do cortisol and adrenaline play in memory formation? Is it our brain chemicals that cause us to be 'hangry'? How do hormones and neurotransmitters affect the trajectory of our romantic relationships? These are just some of the questions that Ginny will answer as she meets the scientists at the cutting-edge of research into the world of brain chemistry who are uncovering the unexpected connections between these crucial chemicals that touch every aspect of our lives. Listeners might be interested in Braintastic. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Vision and Perception is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Kalanit Grill-Spector, Professor in Psychology and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. Kalanit Grill-Spector’s is a vision specialist with a background in computational neuroscience. Her research examines how the brain processes visual information and perceives it. This extensive conversation explores how functional imaging techniques are used to visualize the brain in action and how it functions to recognize people, objects and places. Kalanit also discusses how the anatomical and functional properties of the brain change from infancy to childhood through adulthood, and how this development is related to improved visual recognition abilities. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Sleep Insights is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Matthew Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley. This extensive conversation gives a clear and compelling picture of our recent understanding of sleep’s essential role in our daily lives, from reinforcing learning and memory to regulating emotion. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a natureandnurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain (Stanford UP, 2021), Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 80s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain--or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition towards "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs we ask our brains to do. In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World (MIT Press, 2021), Nina Kraus examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing for the first time that the processing of sound drives many of the brain's core functions. Our hearing is always on—we can't close our ears the way we close our eyes—and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don't just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brains when we hear a word—or a chord, or a meow, or a screech. Our hearing brain, Kraus tells us, is vast. It interacts with what we know, with our emotions, with how we think, with our movements, and with our other senses. Auditory neurons make calculations at one-thousandth of a second; hearing is the speediest of our senses. Sound plays an unrecognized role in both healthy and hurting brains. Kraus explores the power of music for healing as well as the destructive power of noise on the nervous system. She traces what happens in the brain when we speak another language, have a language disorder, experience rhythm, listen to birdsong, or suffer a concussion. Kraus shows how our engagement with sound leaves a fundamental imprint on who we are. The sounds of our lives shape our brains, for better and for worse, and help us build the sonic world we live in. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Today I talked to Brandy Schillace about her book Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul (Simon and Schuster, 2021). In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain? Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican's Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity. In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science and against mortality itself--working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died. This "fascinating" (The Wall Street Journal), "provocative" (The Washington Post) tale follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, Cold War politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death. It's a "masterful" (Science) look at our greatest fears and our greatest hopes--and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Learning and Memory is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Alcino Silva, Distinguished Professor of Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Psychology at the David Geffen School of Medicine and Director of the Integrated Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA. Alcino Silva runs a learning and memory lab at UCLA that is focused on a vast number of topics, from schizophrenia and autism to learning and memory. This fascinating conversation explores how he and his colleagues focus on understanding the specific molecular mechanisms of neurobiology with the goal of being able to intervene and repair these mechanisms when they go awry. Further topics include plasticity of the brain, implanting memories, how cognitive deficits associated with developmental disorders can be reversed, the importance of “research maps” for the field and inspired optimism for the future. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Mind-Wandering & Meta-Awareness is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jonathan Schooler, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This wide-ranging conversation examines how mind-wandering can serve as a window into the psychological world of meta-awareness. further topics include the nature of consciousness, mindfulness, creativity, free will, verbal overshadowing and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Mental Health: Policies, Laws and Attitudes is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Elyn Saks, Orrin B. Evans Distinguished Professor of Law, and Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at USC. During this wide-ranging conversation Elyn Saks candidly shares her personal experiences with schizophrenia and discusses the intersection of law, mental health and ethics: the legal and ethical implications surrounding mental health. Further topics include psychotropic medication and the law, criminalization and mental illness, and an exploration of which countries are more progressive with respect to important mental health policies, laws and procedures, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Professor Anna Spain Bradley "wrote this book to be accessible to anyone, because international law is for everyone." In this important book, Professor Anna Spain Bradley explores human choice in international law and political decision making. Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) investigates the neurobiological processes which shape human choice in the framework of international law and shows how human choice impacts decisions on peace and security. Professor Spain Bradley charts important decisions in the international human rights framework to show how human choice has affected decisions about genocide, international intervention into armed conflict and nuclear weapons, and human rights. This is an important book which has the potential to change the way we think about human choice in law, and the implications of human choice in the lives of all people, for whom decisions are made. Professor Spain Bradley calls for a rethink about how we understand human choice, especially in relation to what international law does and what it should do. Professor Anna Spain Bradley is Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an award-winning international law scholar, educator and expert specializing in international dispute resolution, international human rights and combatting global racism. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Jacki Edry's Moving Forward: Reflections on Autism, Neurodiversity, Brain Surgery, and Faith (2021) is a journey between the worlds of autism, neurodiversity, brain surgery recovery, and faith. It provides a rare glimpse into how sensory and neurological processing affect functioning and thought, through the eyes of a professional, parent, and woman who has experienced them firsthand.This book presents an informative, emotional, and empowering account of the challenges and struggles on the road to recovery ‒ as well as the search for understanding, meaning, and faith. It enables you to step into the shoes of someone who has endured the types of sensory irregularities common in people with neurodiversity; including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Irlen Syndrome, Auditory Processing Disorder, and more, and to gain understanding as to how to cope with these challenges and to compensate for them.Moving forward will enlighten parents, professionals, and family members to better understand and assist the neurodivergent people whom they work with and love. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Hilary Glasman-Deal and Andrew Northern, teachers of STEMM communication at the Centre for Academic English, Imperial College London. We talk about what's so special about scientists: their communication! Hilary Glasman-Deal : "You know, if I left this work for just one year, it would be the devil-of-a-job to get back in because the communication norms in each field and even the language itself changes so fast that you've got to go like the wind in order to keep up to date. I mean, let's be honest, we're all a little bit lazy. We'd like to have material that we can fall back on, last year's material for this year's course. But because we can't do that, because we are at the mercy of whatever research articles we are faced with by our students and by faculty, there's no escape for us. That graft has to be done. And it's that graft that gives us the credibility for scientists to trust us in the first place. Without that, you just don't have a starting point. You've got to be absolutely on point in terms of understanding what's currently being published in their fields, what the recent changes are — I mean, Andrew and I sit back to back in an office, in a large office, and sometimes he'll shout across and he'll say, 'Look, can you see this journal has started putting a strapline under the title!' And we all crowd around and say, 'Okay, which other journals are doing that? How's that connected to what's inside the research article? Is it a new sentence? Is it a rewrite of a sentence? What sentence are they using?' You start from that. You start from doing that hard work. And then you're, in a sense, entitled to sit down with authors and they'll trust you to work with them on a piece of writing." Visit the Centre for Academic English here. Find an example of STEMM editing here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The Limits of Consciousness is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Martin Monti, Associate Professor in Psychology and Neurosurgery, Brain Injury Research Centre, UCLA. This extensive conversation examines Martin Monti’s innovative work with patients who are in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state which has led to some surprising results that might well prove to be integral to our development of a deeper understanding of consciousness. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? (MIT Press, 2021), Paul Thagard looks at how computers (“bots”) and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans. Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines—including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars—and the most intelligent animals—including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The Malleability of Memory is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Elizabeth Loftus, a world-renowned expert on human memory and Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science; Criminology, Law, and Society; Cognitive Science and Law at UC Irvine. This extensive conversation covers her ground-breaking work on the misinformation effect, false memories and her battles with “repressed memory” advocates, the introduction of expert memory testimony into legal proceedings and the effect of DNA evidence on convincing judges of the problematic nature of eyewitness testimony. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
At the heart of human intelligence rests a fundamental puzzle: How are we incredibly smart and stupid at the same time? No existing machine can match the power and flexibility of human perception, language, and reasoning. Yet, we routinely commit errors that reveal the failures of our thought processes. What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition (Princeton UP, 2021) makes sense of this paradox by arguing that our cognitive errors are not haphazard. Rather, they are the inevitable consequences of a brain optimized for efficient inference and decision making within the constraints of time, energy, and memory--in other words, data and resource limitations. Framing human intelligence in terms of these constraints, Samuel Gershman shows how a deeper computational logic underpins the "stupid" errors of human cognition. Embarking on a journey across psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and economics, Gershman presents unifying principles that govern human intelligence. First, inductive bias: any system that makes inferences based on limited data must constrain its hypotheses in some way before observing data. Second, approximation bias: any system that makes inferences and decisions with limited resources must make approximations. Applying these principles to a range of computational errors made by humans, Gershman demonstrates that intelligent systems designed to meet these constraints yield characteristically human errors. Examining how humans make intelligent and maladaptive decisions, What Makes Us Smart delves into the successes and failures of cognition. Robert Tosswill is a student the Master of Logic (MoL) program at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Why do newborns show a preference for a face (or something that resembles a face) over a nonface-like object? Why do baby chicks prefer a moving object to an inanimate one? Neither baby human nor baby chick has had time to learn to like faces or movement. In Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2021), neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara argues that the mind is not a blank slate. Early behavior is biologically predisposed rather than learned, and this instinctive or innate behavior, Vallortigara says, is key to understanding the origins of knowledge. Drawing on research carried out in his own laboratory over several decades, Vallortigara explores what the imprinting process in young chicks, paralleled by the cognitive feats of human newborns, reveals about minds at the onset of life. He explains that a preference for faces or representations of something face-like and animate objects--predispositions he calls "life detectors"--streamlines learning, allowing minds to avoid a confusing multiplicity of objects in the environment, and he considers the possibility that autism spectrum disorders might be linked to a deficit in the preference for the animate. He also demonstrates that animals do not need language to think, and that addition and subtraction can be performed without numbers. The origin of knowledge, Vallortigara argues, is the wisdom that humans and animals possess as basic brain equipment, the product of natural history rather than individual development. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Over the past seventy years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, has evolved from a virtually unknown and little-used pamphlet to an imposing and comprehensive compendium of mental disorder. Its nearly 300 conditions have become the touchstones for the diagnoses that patients receive, students are taught, researchers study, insurers reimburse, and drug companies promote. Although the manual is portrayed as an authoritative corpus of psychiatric knowledge, it is a product of intense political conflicts, dissension, and factionalism. The manual results from struggles among psychiatric researchers and clinicians, different mental health professions, and a variety of patient, familial, feminist, gay, and veterans' interest groups. The DSM is fundamentally a social document that both reflects and shapes the professional, economic, and cultural forces associated with its use. In DSM: A History of Psychiatry's Bible (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Allan V. Horwitz examines how the manual, known colloquially as "psychiatry's bible," has been at the center of thinking about mental health in the United States since its original publication in 1952. The first book to examine its entire history, this volume draws on both archival sources and the literature on modern psychiatry to show how the history of the DSM is more a story of the growing social importance of psychiatric diagnoses than of increasing knowledge about the nature of mental disorder. Despite attempts to replace it, Horwitz argues that the DSM persists because its diagnostic entities are closely intertwined with too many interests that benefit from them. This comprehensive treatment should appeal to not only specialists but also anyone who is interested in how diagnoses of mental illness have evolved over the past seven decades—from unwanted and often imposed labels to resources that lead to valued mental health treatments and social services. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Applied Psychology: Thinking Critically is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Stephen Kosslyn, a renowned psychologist and Founder, President and Chief Academic Officer of Foundry College.This wide-ranging conversation explores Kosslyn and his colleagues’ extensive analysis of research results on the differences between what the top parts of the brain and the bottom parts of the brain do and what the implications of those results are for everyday life which led to a new theory of personality called the Theory of Cognitive Modes. In addition the discussion covers how pedagogical principles were applied in the real world of learning and teaching by establishing Minerva Schools at KGI. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about how the Vietnam War was really just one big fat rejected manuscript. Joshua Schimel : "One of the challenges, I think, we have in science is that all the way up through university, we're being taught scientific knowledge. But that isn't really science. That's the product of science. Science is the process of learning new things. And there's this wonderful book, Ignorance: How it drives science, by Stuart Firestein, and the book is elegant in that idea of reminding people that science is about ignorance. Science is about what we don't know and how to figure it out. And so, for example, in a good Introduction to an article, you're not just trying to tell people everything we know about a field, you're trying either to identify the gap in what we know or, as the most important papers do, to locate the error in what we do know: 'We've been thinking about things this one way, but we've been wrong in some part of that thinking.' That's going to really engage the experts." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Unlike most patients with Alzheimer's, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer's several years before any official diagnosis could be made. Forewarned by genetic testing showing he carried alleles that increased the risk of developing the disease, he noticed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment long before any tests would have alerted him. In A Tattoo on my Brain: A Neurologist's Personal Battle against Alzheimer's Disease (Cambridge UP, 2021), Dr Gibbs documents the effect his diagnosis has had on his life and explains his advocacy for improving early recognition of Alzheimer's. Weaving clinical knowledge from decades caring for dementia patients with his personal experience of the disease, this is an optimistic tale of one man's journey with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
How could you lose your memory overnight, and what would it mean? The day neurologist Jed Barash sees the baffling brain scan of a young patient with devastating amnesia marks the beginning of a quest to answer those questions. First detected in a cluster of stigmatized opioid overdose victims in Massachusetts with severe damage to the hippocampus--the brain's memory center--this rare syndrome reveals how the tragic plight of the unfortunate few can open the door to advances in medical science. After overcoming initial skepticism that investigating the syndrome is worth the effort--and that fentanyl is the likely culprit--Barash and a growing team of dedicated doctors explore the threat that people who take opioids chronically as prescribed to treat severe pain may gradually put their memories at risk. At the same time, they begin to grasp the potential for this syndrome to shed light on the most elusive memory thief of all--Alzheimer's disease. Through the prism of this fascinating story, Aguirre goes on to examine how researchers tease out the fundamental nature of memory and the many mysteries still to be solved. Where do memories live? Why do we forget most of what happens in a day but remember some events with stunning clarity years later? How real are our memories? And what purpose do they actually serve? Perhaps the greatest mystery in The Memory Thief: And the Secrets Behind How We Remember (Pegasus, 2021) is why Alzheimer's has evaded capture for a century even though it afflicts tens of millions around the world and lies in wait for millions more. Aguirre deftly explores this question and reveals promising new strategies and developments that may finally break the long stalemate in the fight against this dreaded disease. But at its core, Aguirre's genre-bending and deeply-reported book is about paying attention to the things that initially don't make sense--like the amnestic syndrome--and how these mysteries can move science closer to an ever-evolving version of the truth. The research and writing of The Memory Thief was supported in part by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Beyond Mirror Neurons is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Greg Hickok, Professor of Cognitive science at UC Irvine, where he directs the Center for Language Science and the Auditory and Language Neuroscience Lab. This thought-provoking conversation examines Greg Hickok’s neuroscience research related to speech and language which led him to eventually reject many aspects of the mirror neuron hypothesis, while giving his views on the mechanisms behind imitation and what mirror neurons really do. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (MIT Press, 2021), Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image–and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization. Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists’ body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen’s biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Understanding ADHD is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Stephen Hinshaw, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley. Stephen Hinshaw is an expert in the fields of clinical child and adolescent psychology and developmental psychopathology, as well as stigma, preventive interventions and dehumanization related to mental illness. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science. An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness. Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2020) sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cutting-edge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness. Being You is a life-changing existential insight into being you. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Knowing One’s Place: Space and the Brain is based on an in-depth, filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jennifer Groh, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. After an inspiring story about how she became interested in neuroscience, this thoughtful conversation examines Jennifer Groh’s extensive research on how the brain combines various streams of sensory input to determine where things are, together with the corresponding implications for a wide range of issues, from neuroplasticity to evolutionary mechanisms, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Autism: A Genetic Perspective is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Gargus, Professor of Physiology, Biophysics and Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Autism Research and Translation at UC Irvine. This wide-ranging conversation examines the recent explosion in our genetic understanding and its implications for the future of medicine, together with the importance of understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms in order to successfully treat a wide range of genetic disorders. Prof. Gargus focuses on autism, dispelling myths associated with the condition, advocating why a treatment should be actively pursued, and illustrating what we can learn from the recent breakthrough in cystic fibrosis research. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Exploring Autism is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and one of the world’s leading experts on autism Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London. Topics that are examined in this extensive conversation are what autism actually is, the reasons behind the increased number of diagnoses over the last few years, autism spectrum disorders, Asperger’s syndrome, mentalizing, brain imaging to research the cognitive and neurobiological bases of autism and much more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In Search of a Mechanism: From the Brain to the Mind is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology at University College London and Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London. After an interesting exploration of how Chris Frith became interested in the study of schizophrenia, this detailed conversation examines topics such how our understanding of schizophrenia has evolved, the role of dopamine, how the brain works, the brain’s predicting role, the phantom limb phenomenon, how the brain and mind link up, how culture affects the brain and much more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The Science of Emotions is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Barbara Fredrickson, Director Positive Emotions & Psychology Laboratory at UNC Chapel Hill. Why do we smile, laugh and actively seek out personal connections with the people around us? Why does it feel good and what evolutionary purposes do our so-called “positive emotions” serve? Topics covered by this extensive conversation include Barbara’s work on the science of positive emotions, including her broaden-and-build theory, the undoing effect and upward spirals, while highlighting relevant evolutionary-driven hypotheses together with measurement details of empirical studies. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Plato's Allegory of the Cave trapped us in the illusion that mind is separate from body and from the natural and physical world. Knowledge had to be eternal and absolute. Recent scientific advances, however, show that our bodies shape mind, thought, and language in a deep and pervasive way. In Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing (MIT Press, 2021), Mark Johnson and Don Tucker—a philosopher and a neuropsychologist—propose a radical rethinking of certain traditional views about human cognition and behavior. They argue for a theory of knowing as embodied, embedded, enactive, and emotionally based. Knowing is an ongoing process—shaped by our deepest biological and cultural values. Johnson and Tucker describe a natural philosophy of mind that is emerging through the convergence of biology, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, and they explain recent research showing that all of our higher-level cognitive activities are rooted in our bodies through processes of perception, motive control of action, and feeling. This developing natural philosophy of mind offers a psychological, philosophical, and neuroscientific account that is at once scientifically valid and subjectively meaningful—allowing us to know both ourselves and the world. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Speaking and Thinking is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Victor Ferreira, Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Language Production Lab at the University of California at San Diego. This extensive conversation explores Victor Ferreira’s research which is focused on language production, especially with regard to grammar, lexical structure and speaker-hearer interaction, and his interests to incorporate computational and quantitative modelling of cognitive processing. Topics under discussion include key experimental results that change our view of what is actually going on when two people talk to each other, giving us new insight into the structure of language and also how many aspects of linguistics are related to our current understanding of how the brain and mind function. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Constructing Our World: The Brain’s-Eye View is a detailed book based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Lisa Feldman Barrett, University Distinguished Professor in Psychology at Northeastern University. This wide-ranging conversations explores Lisa’s winding career path from pre-med to clinical psychology to an academic career in neuroscience, her research on how the brain works and the development of her theory of emotion: every moment of our life, our brain is anticipating and making sense of sensory inputs from its environment—the combination of the internal environment of the body and the external environment—and our brain uses conceptual knowledge to do that.
Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Neurolaw is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nita Farahany, Robert O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Nita Farahany is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies. This wide-ranging conversation examines the growing impact of modern neuroscience on the law, deepening our understanding of a wide range of issues, from legal responsibility to the American Constitution’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
We are conscious of only a small fraction of our lives. Because the brain constantly receives an enormous quantity of information, we need to be able to do things without thinking about them—to act in “autopilot” mode. Automatic behaviors—the vast majority of our activities—occur without our conscious awareness, or subconsciously. Yet the physiological basis of subconsciousness remains poorly understood, despite its vast importance for physical and mental health. The neurodegenerative disease expert Yves Agid offers a groundbreaking and accessible account of subconsciousness and its significance. He pinpoints the basal ganglia—the ancient “basement of the brain”—as the main physiological hub of the subconscious. Agid examines its roles in the control and production of automatic behavior, including motor, intellectual, and emotional processes. He highlights the consequences for various brain pathologies, showing how malfunctions of the subconscious have clinical repercussions including not only abnormal involuntary movements, as seen in Parkinson’s disease, but also psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorders and depression. Based on this understanding, Agid considers how seeing the basal ganglia as a therapeutic target can aid development of potential new treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Shedding new light on the physiological bases of our behavior and mental states, Subconsciousness: Automatic Behavior and the Brain (Columbia UP, 2021) provides an innovative exploration of the complexities of the mind, with implications ranging from clinical applications to philosophy’s thorniest problems. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Mindsets: Growing Your Brain is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and renowned psychologist Carol Dweck, Stanford University. This conversation provides behind-the-scenes, detailed insights into the development of Carol’s important work on growth mindsets and fixed mindsets: how different ways of thinking influence learning ability and success. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep (W. W. Norton, 2021), psychologist Dr. Antonio Zadra and neuroscientist Dr. Robert Stickgold offer a fascinating survey of the biological and psychological bases of dreams and dreaming. The authors address head-on fundamental questions such as why do we dream? Do dreams hold psychological meaning or are they merely the reflection of random brain activity? What purpose do dreams serve? As part of their synthesis, Zadra and Stickgold introduce a new conceptual model of dream function, NEXTUP (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities). This model can help readers and scientists to understand key features of several types of dreams, from prophetic dreams to nightmares and lucid dreams. When Brains Dream also explores the history of psychological, neuroscientific, and psychoanalytic dream research, examines a host of dream-related disorders, and explains how dreams can facilitate creativity and be a source of personal insight. Dr. Robert Stickold is a full professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A sleep researcher, his work focuses on the relationship between sleep and learning. His articles in the popular press are intended to illustrate the dangers of sleep deprivation. Dr. Antonio Zadra is full Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, and is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, as well as a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Intimate Relationship Problems and Sexual Abuse. His research covers a wide range of topics on the psychology of dreaming, including parasomnias, somnambulism, interactions with personality and well-being, and consciousness. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
An edgy and ambitious debut by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary fiction Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness. But when he's offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focusing on his work, however, Kierk becomes obsessed with another project--investigating the sudden and suspicious death of a colleague. As his search for truth brings him closer to Carmen Green, another postdoc, their list of suspects grows, along with the sense that something sinister may be happening all around them. The Revelations (Overlook Press, 2021), not unlike its main character, is ambitious and abrasive, challenging and disarming. Bursting with ideas, ranging from Greek mythology to the dark realities of animal testing, to some of the biggest unanswered questions facing scientists today, The Revelations is written in muscular, hypnotic prose, and its cyclically dreamlike structure pushes the boundaries of literary fiction. Erik Hoel has crafted a stunning debut of rare power--an intense look at cutting-edge science, consciousness, and human connection. You can find Erik Hoel on Substack at https://erikhoel.substack.com/ and on Twitter @erikphoel. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Investigating Intelligence is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and neuroscientist John Duncan, University of Cambridge, and examines fascinating questions in neuroscience such as: What is intelligence and what does IQ testing tell us? Can intelligence be measured and improved? What role does our frontal lobe play in executive control? John Duncan has rigorously investigated these types of issues for years and this conversation covers all those questions plus topics such as impairments following brain damage, functional brain imaging, and the brain basis for attention, intelligence and cognitive control, and much more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Believing Your Ears: Examining Auditory Illusions is based on an extensive filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego and one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of music. This conversation provides behind the scenes insights into her discovery of a large number of auditory illusions, including the so-called Octave Illusion, which concretely illustrate how what we think we’re hearing is often quite different from the actual sounds that are hitting our eardrums. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Philosophy of Brain is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, UC San Diego. Patricia Churchland has done extensive research in the fields of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of the mind and neuroethics. During this mind-stretching conversation Patricia explores how the brain works, how we are able to represent the external world of objects and our inner world of thoughts, self and consciousness. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Building on work in feminist studies, queer studies and critical race theory, this volume challenges the universality of propositions about human nature, by questioning the boundaries between predominant neurotypes and 'others', including dyslexics, autistics and ADHDers. Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (Routledge, 2020) is the first work of its kind to bring cutting-edge research across disciplines to the concept of neurodiversity. It offers in-depth explorations of the themes of cure/prevention/eugenics; neurodivergent wellbeing; cross-neurotype communication; neurodiversity at work; and challenging brain-bound cognition. It analyses the role of neuro-normativity in theorising agency, and a proposal for a new alliance between the Hearing Voices Movement and neurodiversity. In doing so, we contribute to a cultural imperative to redefine what it means to be human. To this end, we propose a new field of enquiry that finds ways to support the inclusion of neurodivergent perspectives in knowledge production, and which questions the theoretical and mythological assumptions that produce the idea of the neurotypical. Working at the crossroads between sociology, critical psychology, medical humanities, critical disability studies, and critical autism studies, and sharing theoretical ground with critical race studies and critical queer studies, the proposed new field - neurodiversity studies - will be of interest to people working in all these areas. Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
The Psychology of Bilingualism is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Ellen Bialystok, Professor of Psychology at York University. Ellen Bialystok is a world-leading expert on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive processes across our lifespan. This extensive conversation examines how Ellen discovered differences in the development of essential cognitive and language abilities for bilingual children, the use of different brain networks by monolingual and bilingual young adults performing simple conflict tasks, and the postponement of symptoms of dementia in bilingual older adults, and many more fascinating aspects of bilingualism. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Being Social is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Roy Baumeister, Professor of Psychology at the University of Queensland. This extensive conversation explores Roy Baumeister’s unique combination of biological and psychological thinking from recognizing essential energetic factors involved with willpower and decision-making, to framing free will in evolutionary biological terms to measuring the numbness associated with social rejection as a form of analgesic response, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Regular listeners to this podcast will be well aware of my strong conviction that the Perceptual Control Theory initially formulated by William T. Powers entails many significant contributions to the domains of systems and cybernetics despite the fact that, for the last several decades, its applications have been further developed in a largely “adjacent” academic community. It is in the ongoing spirit of a much-needed rapprochement between these fields, that previous guest, Warren Mansell, returns to this podcast; this time, as editor of The Interdisciplinary Handbook of Perceptual Control Theory – Vol. 1, out from Elsevier in 2020. Astonishing in its sweeping, panoramic view of the contemporary sciences, both “natural” and “social,” this magnificent volume brings together the latest research, theory, and applications of Powers’ powerful and parsimonious theory proposing that the behavior of a living organism lies in the control of perceived aspects of both itself and its environment. Illustrating both the fundamental theory and the application of PCT to a broad range of disciplines, various chapters illuminate why perceptual control is fundamental to understanding human nature, describe a new way to do research on brain processes and behavior, reveal how the role of natural selection in behavior can be demystified, explain how engineers can emulate human purposeful behavior in robots with significantly lower computational expense, and so much more. If ever there was a book that could consolidate some of the world’s most rigorous applications of PCT in a manner rendering its remarkable explanatory power and paradigm exploding practical value in vivid detail and inspiring insight, this is it. Tom Scholte is a Professor of Directing and Acting in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia located on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the Musqueam people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
This Ideas Roadshow Collection includes five Ideas Roadshow books that have been developed from filmed wide-ranging conversations with the following leading neuroscientists: Lisa Feldman Barrett (Northeastern University), Jennifer Groh (Duke University), Kalanit Grill-Spector (Stanford University), John Duncan (Cambridge University) and Miguel Nicolelis (Duke University). Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy. This collection includes a detailed preface highlighting the connections between the different books which offer a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship while each individual book also includes a detailed introduction plus questions for discussion. These mind-stretching books provide readers through an engaging dialogue format with a wide range of fascinating findings in today's neuroscience research, such as: how the brain combines various streams of sensory input to determine where things are, together with the corresponding implications for a wide range of issues, from neuroplasticity to evolutionary mechanisms; how our brain is anticipating and making sense of sensory inputs from its environment; how functional imaging techniques are used to visualize the brain in action and how it functions to recognize people, objects and places; whether intelligence can be measured and improved; what role our frontal lobe plays in executive control; sophisticated ways of harnessing the thoughts of rats, monkeys and humans to drive mechanical devices in the rapidly emerging field of brain-machine interfaces, and much more. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
A path-breaking journey into the brain, showing how perception, thought, and action are products of maps etched into your gray matter—and how technology can use them to read your mind. Your brain is a collection of maps. That is no metaphor: scrawled across your brain’s surfaces are actual maps of the sights, sounds, and actions that hold the key to your survival. Scientists first began uncovering these maps over a century ago, but we are only now beginning to unlock their secrets—and comprehend their profound impact on our lives. Brain maps distort and shape our experience of the world, support complex thought, and make technology-enabled mind reading a modern-day reality, which raises important questions about what is real, what is fair, and what is private. They shine a light on our past and our possible futures. In the process, they invite us to view ourselves from a startling new perspective. In Brainscapes: The Warped, Wondrous Maps Written in Your Brain and How They Guide You (HMH, 2021), Rebecca Schwarzlose combines unforgettable real-life stories, cutting-edge research, and vivid illustrations to reveal brain maps’ surprising lessons about our place in the world—and about the world’s place within us. Support for this book was provided through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics Program. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry (Dutton, 2019), a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds.
Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations yet can become overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation. On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud? Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. 16 million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their seventies and eighties, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2025. Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It (St. Martin's Press, 2021) traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis. While it is an unambiguous account of decades of missed opportunities and our health care systems’ failures to take action, it tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow Alzheimer’s to finally be prevented and treated by medicine and also presents an argument for how we can live with dementia: the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of self, how families can support their loved ones, and the innovative reforms we can make as a society that would give caregivers and patients better quality of life. Rich in science, history, and characters, The Problem of Alzheimer's takes us inside laboratories, patients' homes, caregivers’ support groups, progressive care communities, and Jason Karlawish's own practice at the Penn Memory Center. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom—the Metazoa—they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds. In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (FSG, 2020), Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung species. As he delves into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do, Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the animal body well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. In accessible, riveting prose, he charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments—eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment—shaped the subjective lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds, and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers their stories together in a way that bridges the gap between mind and matter, addressing one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness. Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and vibrant as life itself. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Through discussion of his famous 1970s experiment alongside new research, in Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can (Columbia University Press, 2019), Herbert Terrace argues that, despite the failure of famous attempts to teach primates to speak, from these efforts we can learn something important: the missing link between non-linguistic and linguistic creatures is the ability to use words, not to form sentences. Situating language-learning as a capacity gained through conversation, not primarily representing internal thought, Terrace takes naming as the first step towards language. By drawing on research in developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and linguistics, Terrace builds a case for understanding human language as grounded in social interaction between mother and child, rather than an inevitable, asocial result of a person’s development. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer's (Columbia UP, 2021) is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease. Beginning with the discovery of “presenile dementia” in the early twentieth century, Han Yu examines over a century of research and controversy. She presents the leading hypotheses for what causes Alzheimer’s; discusses each hypothesis’s tangled origins, merits, and gaps; and details their successes and failures. Yu synthesizes a vast amount of medical literature, historical studies, and media interviews, telling the gripping stories of researchers’ struggles while situating science in its historical, social, and cultural contexts. Her chronicling of the trajectory of Alzheimer’s research deftly balances rich scientific detail with attention to the wider implications. In narrating the attempts to find a treatment, Yu also offers a critical account of research and drug development and a consideration of the philosophy of aging. Wide-ranging and accessible, Mind Thief is an important book for all readers interested in the challenge of Alzheimer’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
An exposé of the corruption of medicine by the pharmaceutical industry at every level, from exploiting the vulnerable destitute for drug testing, through manipulation of research data, to disease mongering and promoting drugs that do more harm than good. Authors, Professor Jon Jureidini and Dr Leemon McHenry, made critical contributions to exposing the scientific misconduct in two infamous trials of antidepressants. Ghostwritten publications of these trials were highly influential in prescriptions of paroxetine (Paxil) and citalopram (Celexa) in paediatric and adolescent depression, yet both trials (Glaxo Smith Kline's paroxetine study 329 and Forest Laboratories' citalopram study CIT-MD-18) seriously misrepresented the efficacy and safety data. The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research (Wakefield Press, 2020) provides a detailed account of these studies and argues that medicine desperately needs to re-evaluate its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. Without a basis for independent evaluation of the results of randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trials, there can be no confidence in evidence-based medicine. Science demands rigorous, critical examination and especially severe testing of hypotheses to function properly, but this is exactly what is lacking in academic medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Would your dog eat you if you died? What are face mites? Why do clowns creep us out? In this illuminating collection of grisly true science stories, journalist Erika Engelhaupt, the writer of National Geographic’s highly acclaimed Gory Details blog, shares the answers to these questions and many more. Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science (National Geographic, 2020) explores the strange and shocking realities of our minds, our bodies and our universe, taking readers on a fascinating tour through overlooked but astonishing aspects of biology, anatomy, nature and more, as well as the ways that science helps to break down taboos surrounding such conversation topics as women’s bodies. Blending humor and real science, Engelhaupt shares captivating stories and intriguing research that will alter the way readers view the world. From a peek inside the world's smallest crime scenes to a hands-on look at maggot farming, Gory Details features top-notch reporting, interviews with leading scientists and a healthy dose of wit. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Based on a viral article, the gripping medical mystery story of Ron Davis, a world-class Stanford geneticist who has put his career on the line to find the cure for chronic fatigue syndrome, the disease killing his son. For the past six years, Whitney Dafoe has been confined to a bedroom in the back of his parents' home, unable to walk, to eat, to speak. The sound of music causes him pain. At one point, the formerly healthy, young, freelance photographer, faced starvation as his 6'3" frame withered to 115 pounds. In desperation, Whitney and his parents went from one specialist to another, and still no answers. Then, finally, a diagnosis: the mysterious disease myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Whitney's story is heartbreaking, but it's also one of redemption. It reaches far beyond just one family's harrowing tale. Today, ME/CFS affects between 1 and 2.5 million Americans--and 20 million people around the world. Those afflicted largely suffer in silence because the disease is little known and much misunderstood. The question lingers still whether it even exists outside the patient's mind. Often disbelieved, they're abandoned by family and friends. They lose their jobs, and battle with insurance companies over rising medical costs as the chronic disease continues on year after year. In one way, Whitney has been lucky. He could reach out to his father, a world renowned, scientist, for answers. This book is the story of one father's desperate hunt for the insidious illness that stole his son away. The Puzzle Solver follows Ron as he unravels the molecular trail within his own son's donated blood and genome, to began to find answers. He confirms this is a biological disease and uncovers new possibilities for treatments and potentially a cure. At its heart, The Puzzle Solver: A Scientist's Desperate Hunt to Cure the Illness That Stole His Son by Tracie White and Ronald W. Davis (Hachette Books, 2021) is about more than just cutting edge research or a race to find the cure for ME/CFS--it's about the unbreakable bond between a father and his son, and the lengths to which a parent will go to save their child's life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done (Princeton UP, 2020) is a look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives. Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done? In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
A scientist assesses the potential of stem cell therapies for treating such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Stem cell therapies are the subject of enormous hype, endowed by the media with almost magical qualities and imagined by the public to bring about miracle cures. Stem cells have the potential to generate new cells of different types, and have been shown to do so in certain cases. Could stem cell transplants repair the damaged brain? In his book The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy (MIT Press, 2020), neurobiologist Jack Price assesses the potential of stem cell therapies to treat such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries. Certainly brain disorders are in need of effective treatments. These disorders don’t just kill, they disable, and conventional drug therapies have not had much success in treating them. Price explains that repairing the human brain is difficult, largely because of its structural, functional, and developmental complexity. He examines the self-repairing capacity of blood and gut cells—and the lack of such capacity in the brain; describes the limitations of early brain stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative disorders; and discusses current clinical trials that may lead to the first licensed stem cell therapies for stroke, Parkinson’s and macular degeneration. And he describes the real promise of pluripotential stem cells, which can make all the cell types that constitute the body. New technologies, Price reports, challenge the very notion of cell transplantation, instead seeking to convince the brain itself to manufacture the new cells it needs. Could this be the true future of brain repair? You can find more about Jack’s work here and here. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives (Dutton Books, 2020), Daniel J. Levitin delivers powerful insights: • Debunking the myth that memory always declines with age • Confirming that “health span”—not “life span”—is what matters • Proving that sixty-plus years is a unique and newly recognized developmental stage • Recommending that people look forward to joy, as reminiscing doesn’t promote health Levitin looks at the science behind what we all can learn from those who age joyously, as well as how to adapt our culture to take full advantage of older people’s wisdom and experience. Throughout his exploration of what aging really means, using research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive- enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age.
Successful Aging inspires a powerful new approach to how readers think about our final decades, and it will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens within a society where the average life expectancy continues to rise. Victoria Reedman is a resident doctor in Toronto studying neurology with some health systems work on the side. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Why are humans alone capable of invention? This question is relevant to every human invention, from music to mathematics, sculpture and science, dating back to the beginnings of civilization. In The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention, Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, presents a new theory of human invention. His unexpected claim is that understanding autistic people — specifically their unstoppable drive to seek patterns, a characteristic of the condition — is the key to understanding both the ancient origins and the modern flowering of human creativity. In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen’s goal is two-fold: to provide an answer to the long-standing question about human invention and to understand the role that autistic people played in the evolution of human invention. His higher message is to change the way our society views and treats autistic people. “Among the new generation of hypersystemizers will be some of the great inventors of our future…If we acknowledge that some autistic people were and still are the drivers of the evolution of science, technology, art, and other forms of invention, their future can be different.” Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better (BenBella, 2020), eminent neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields surveys the history and current state of scientific understanding about the brain as an electrical organ, and how the electrical activity of the brain relates to cognitive functioning and various clinical conditions. The book begins by documenting some of the fascinating and obscure history of the discovery and early science of electrical brain activity measurements, or ‘brainwaves’. It then goes on to summarize the latest cutting edge research on brainwaves in a wide variety of basic and applied areas of science and medicine - including neuroimaging, neuroplasticity, brain-machine interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurofeedback, brain stimulation therapies, and many others. Electric Brain is a highly accessible, but fact-filled and up-to-date, treatment of one of the most central - and yet still so enigmatic - topics in all of modern science. Dr. R Douglas Fields is Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the United States National Institutes of Health. He is a world expert on neuron-glia interactions and cellular mechanisms of memory, and is particularly well known for his work on white matter plasticity. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Is color a phenomenon of science or a thing of art? Over the years, color has dazzled, enhanced, and clarified the world we see, embraced through the experimental palettes of painting, the advent of the color photograph, Technicolor pictures, color printing, on and on, a vivid and vibrant celebrated continuum. These turns to represent reality in “living color” echo our evolutionary reliance on and indeed privileging of color as a complex and vital form of consumption, classification, and creation. It’s everywhere we look, yet do we really know much of anything about it? Finding color in stars and light, examining the system of classification that determines survival through natural selection, studying the arrival of color in our universe and as a fulcrum for philosophy, DeSalle’s brilliant A Natural History of Color: The Science Behind What We See and How We See it (Pegasus Books, 2020)establishes that an understanding of color on many different levels is at the heart of learning about nature, neurobiology, individualism, even a philosophy of existence. Color and a fine tuned understanding of it is vital to understanding ourselves and our consciousness. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Everyone ages, and just about everyone uses language, making Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging (MIT Press, 2019) a book with practically universal relevance. The authors, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts, show readers what cognitive science can tell us—and what it can’t—about the relationship between aging and language. Through accounts of research written for a general audience, Kreuz and Roberts explain how underlying cognitive functions, such as memory and perception, are responsible for much of the changes that people associate with aging, and that linguistic capabilities are more resilient than many may think. They explore a range of changes that occur as people age, focusing on speaking, listening, reading, and writing. While they are clear that the jury may be out on some of the phenomena they explore—such as whether older people have greater difficulty interpreting figurative language—they note that other correlations are more robust, such as the relationship between reading fiction and living long lives. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
When is sorrow sickness? That is the question that this book asks, exploring how our understandings of sadness, melancholy, depression, mania and anxiety have changed over time, and how societies have tried to treat something which lies on the border between the natural and the pathological. Jonathan Sadowsky's book The Empire of Depression: A New History (Polity, 2020) explores the various medical treatments for depression, classed as a modern illness with definite (but changing) symptoms from the 20th century onwards, in relation to a longer history of treatments for ‘melancholia’ and related states considered either as biological or social sicknesses or as a natural part of some people’s constitution. He also compares the western history of medicalising depression with the experiences of both sadness and clinical depression in non-western cultures, such as Nigeria and Japan. He asks, what have we lost as a consequence of the hegemony of the western clinical model, and how can we reclaim the patient experience in the face of sometimes hostile doctors and pharmaceutical companies? The book is poetic but well-researched, written by a leading medical historian, and distinguished from the crowd of books about depression through its global focus, and its historical rigour. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In this episode I talked to Russell T. Warne about his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (Cambridge UP, 2020). Warne takes on the “nature versus nurture” debate regarding the source of intelligence. It also looks at a host of other angles related to IQ: from the failures of the No Child Left Behind act to what are the disadvantages to society are of an emerging intellectual meritocracy. Along the way it explores differences in scores based on ethnic/racial origins, plus how well EQ holds up as a separate form of intelligence. Russell T. Warne is an associate professor of psychology at Utah Valley University. He earned his PhD in education psychology from Texas A&M University in 2011. Dr. Warne has published two books and nearly 60 scholarly articles. He teaches classes on statistics, psychology, research methods, psychological testing, and intelligence. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Our practices of holding people morally and legally responsible for what they do rests on causal relationships between our mental states and our actions – a desire for revenge or a fear for one’s safety may cause a violent act. In either case, John Campbell argues, there is a psychological causal process that leads from the motivating mental state to the action. In Causation in Psychology (Harvard University Press, 2020), Campbell – who is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, claims that the existence of such singular causal relations and our knowledge of them do not depend on the existence of psychological generalizations under which they might be subsumed. Moreover, imaginative understanding or empathy enables us to trace these one-off, idiosyncratic causal sequences and thereby attain knowledge of these singular psychological causal relations. Campbell uses his analysis to distinguish human freedom of action at the level of causal process and to provide a new perspective on the traditional mind-body problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
An estimated 80 million people live with a neurodegenerative disease, with this number expected to double by 2050. Despite decades of research and billions in funding, there are no medications that can slow, much less stop, the progress of these diseases. The time to rethink degenerative brain disorders has come. With no biological boundaries between neurodegenerative diseases, illnesses such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's result from a large spectrum of biological abnormalities, hampering effective treatment. In Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them (Cambridge UP, 2020), acclaimed neurologist Dr Alberto Espay and Parkinson's advocate Benjamin Stecher present compelling evidence that these diseases should be targeted according to genetic and molecular signatures rather than clinical diagnoses. There is no Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, simply people with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. An incredibly important story never before told, Brain Fables is a wakeup call to the scientific community and society, explaining why we have no effective disease-modifying treatments, and how we can get back on track. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Reducing harm or shrinking the likelihood of accidental death are remarkably contentions projects—in areas from sex education, to pandemic management, to drug use. Nancy Campbell’s important new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (MIT Press, 2020) explores how a therapy that can stop an accidental drug overdose, called Naloxone, emerged in the American mainstream in the early years of the new millennium—despite existing in some form for nearly a century. What are now called “opioid antagonists” were used, not to save lives, but deployed by the carceral state to police drug users in the early twentieth century; sequestered within bioscience laboratories to build molecular theories of how the brain worked at midcentury; approved by the FDA in 1971 for the treatment of overdose only by physicians; and illicitly administered and widely shared in the 1980s and 1990s among drug-user-led activist organizations and communities, who created their own troves of training protocols, peer-education networks, and experiential evidence of its effectiveness. In the twenty-first century, Naloxone appeared on public policy agendas around harm reduction and arrived legally in the hands of the people best situated to intervene when an overdose was underway—but only in some US states and some countries. Campbell tunes readers’ ears to the politics of evidence, the health effects of stigma, and the racism of false medical claims as she listens, amid a century of contention, to the quietness of “undone science.” As evidence, this intrepid book uses visual culture, vernacular documents, oral histories, and (expertly explained) scientific publications. It connects American histories at federal and local levels with the UK and especially Scotland. And it relates medical communities and activist networks without imposing false divides or drawing caricatures of either. The book builds on Campbell’s four previous books on the history of addiction, gendering knowledge, and social theory from the position of Science and Technology Studies. The interview was a collaborative project among participants in the Vanderbilt University course, American Medicine & the World. For information about using NBN interviews as part of pedagogical practice, please email Laura Stark or see the essay “Can New Media Save the Book?” in Contexts (2015). Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
There is a long history of brain research that seems to legitimize widely held beliefs about the men versus women. According to my guest, much of that research is founded on biases and misguided experiments, which raises the questions: Are there any meaningful neurological differences between men and women? And if so, what are they? To find out, you’ll want to listen to my interview with Dr. Gina Rippon, author of the book, Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (2020, Vintage Books). We talk about the difference between good and bad science in this area and how the field of psychology has contributed to misinformed but long-lasting ideas about gender differences. This episode will interest those longing for clarity about male versus female brains and shed light on the role of science in shaping social perceptions about the sexes. Gina Rippon, Ph.D. is an honorary professor of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston Brain Centre at Aston University in Birmingham, England. Her research involves the use of state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism. In 2015, she was made a honorary fellow of the British Science Association for her contributions to the public communication of science. Dr. Rippon is part of the European Union Gender Equality Network, belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and is a member of Robert Peston’s Speakers for Schools program and the Inspiring the Future intitative. She lives in the United Kingdom. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.” In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020), acclaimed professor of neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, finally challenges this damaging myth by showing how the science community has engendered bias and stereotype by rewarding studies that show difference rather than sameness. Drawing on cutting edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Rippon presents the latest evidence which finally proves that brains are like mosaics comprised of both male and female components, and that they remain plastic, adapting throughout the course of a person’s life. Discernable gender identities, she asserts, are shaped by society where scientific misconceptions continue to be wielded and perpetuated to the detriment of our children, our own lives, and our culture. Gina Rippon is a British neuroscientist and feminist. She is a an honorary professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University in Birmingham, England. In 2015 she was made honorary fellow of the British Science Association. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and is a member of the European Union Gender Equality Network, belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and the Inspiring the Future intiative. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019). A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality―the blueprint that makes us who we are. Robert Plomin’s decades of work demonstrate that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Nature, not nurture, is what makes us who we are. Plomin explores the implications of these findings, drawing some provocative conclusions―among them that parenting styles don't really affect children's outcomes once genetics is taken into account. This book offers readers a unique insider's view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Dr. Christopher Harris (@chrisharris) is a neuroscientist, engineer and educator at the EdTech company Backyard Brains. He is principal investigator on an NIH-funded project to develop brain-based robots for neuroscience education. In their recent open-access research paper, Dr. Harris and his team describe, and present results from, their classroom-based pilots of this new and highly innovative approach to neuroscience and STEM education. They argue that neurorobotics has enormous potential as an education technology, because it combines multiple activities with clear educational benefits including neuroscience, active learning, and robotics. Dr. Harris did his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he developed his life-long love of the brain. For his graduate work at the University of Sussex and subsequent postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health he applied electrophysiological, optical and computational techniques to construct cellular-resolution maps of large and diverse neural circuits. He is particularly interested in reward-system, visual system, and central motor pattern generator circuits. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the “schizophrenogenic” mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, bringing hope for paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The NBN’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain. Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (University of Chicago Press) is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us. Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life. Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live. Joe Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, Chater first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser. Dr. Nick Chater is Professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School and cofounder of Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neuroscience, and philosophy, NeuroScience Fiction takes us from Vanilla Sky to neural research labs, and from Planet of the Apes to what makes us human. The end result is a sort of bio-technological “Sophie’s World for the 21st Century”, and a compelling update on the state of human knowledge through its cultural expressions in film and art. Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the principles of visual perception and memory, and is credited with the discovery of "Concept cells" or "Jennifer Aniston neurons" - neurons in the human brain that play a key role in memory formation. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind (Harvard UP, 2020), cognitive scientist, empirical philosopher & historian of science, technology, and the senses A. S. Barwich asks a deceptively simple question: What does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it? Barwich interviews experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the biological mechanics and myriad meanings of odors. She argues that it is time to stop recycling ideas based on the paradigm of vision for the olfactory system. Scents are often fickle and boundless in comparison with visual images, and they do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Although olfaction remains a puzzle, Barwich proposes that what we know suggests the brain acts not only like a map but also as a measuring device, one that senses and processes simple and complex odors. In this interview, we discuss the history of olfaction as an art and a science, what smell can tell us about perception and our philosophy of mind, and why smell is an important sense today more than ever. This episode is triply exciting, because it marks not just the release of a lively and brilliant new book, Smellosophy, which has, in the short time since its release last month, received a series of well-deserved sparking reviews in the popular and academic press, but also the first appearance of two new voices on the New Books Network: Joseph Fridman, and Dr. Ann-Sophie Barwich, both of whom are joining the network as hosts of New Books in Neuroscience. They join Dr. John Griffiths and Dr. Christopher Harris to round out the starting host lineup for the New Books in Neuroscience channel, which will be bringing you deep interviews with boundary-pushing authors in the neurosciences wherever you listen to your podcasts. Ann-Sophie Barwich is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. She divides her brain-time between the Department of History & Philosophy of Science and the Cognitive Science Program. Her EEG/Olfactometry lab will open in early 2021, and her tenure as a host of a New Books in Neuroscience will begin in 2020. You can find her on Twitter, logically enough, @smellosopher. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
In The Brain from Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019), György Buzsáki contrasts what he terms the ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ perspectives on neuroscientific theory and research methodology. The ‘outside-in’ approach, which he sees as dominating thinking in the field at present and in most of recent history, conceptualizes the brain as a passive, information-absorbing, coding device. The ‘inside-out’ perspective, which Buzsáki seeks to develop and advocate, sees the brain rather as a device sculpted exquisitely by evolution for the generation and control of action and behaviour. The Brain from Inside Out is a candid and provocative monograph from one of the world’s most respected scientists, full of fascinating insights into the history and future of the science of the mind. Dr György Buzsáki is Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience