WaterCooler Neuroscience

This episode has Jordana and Wilf talking about a review paper that wants to 'shift the paradigm' and discuss how children use the executive function, the ability to alter their actions, and where we should be studying to understand that process. This paper however was written in a way that doesn't fit many scientific standards so we will be hearing from Jordana about how this paper can inform clinical studies and open our minds to new ways to think about how thought and movement are linked. On the other hand, Wilf will be talking about how from an academic perspective this theory has problems and there is an issue with vagueness in this paper which makes it much harder to understand from the research science side of Brains Talking about Brains. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

This episode is bringing you shorts from WCNeuro S4 which did not make it into the main episode. We will be talking about how very controlled experiments in the lab do not automatically relate to flashy headlines like airports are going to read your mind while you go through a metal detector. We also talk about how subliminal messaging is one of the weakest psychological tools a scientist can use, but why supraliminal messaging is everywhere and does have any effect on you. That effect is just not that scary. Wilf also mentions a paper by Dr Davinina Fernadez-Espejo in this episode, the following link provides context to that paper and findings https://jme.bmj.com/content/41/7/534. This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc., an objective quick measure of brain health available today. If you would like to know more about NeuroCatch Inc. please head to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

Today's episode is looking into a paper that studies how our memory builds up the scene around us. It goes without saying that our ability to see is incredible but the mechanics of how our eyes dart around a room, remember details subconsciously and then continue to the next point is the focus of this episode. We are talking about Dr James Kragel's work on this fascinating topic but also talking about how even professional neuroscientists can find new concepts challenging and what both Jordana's and Wilf's backgrounds brought to their understanding of this cutting edge work.

Few professionals require someone to be familiar with how their voice is heard and how people in turn become familiar with a voice than podcasters. Today's guest however is even more of an expert is one of the researchers around the world who study the processing humans do to understand voices. Voice perception and language perception are automatic in humans, even if you don't understand someone's language you can still learn to recognise their voice. You would think that Neuroscience, a field that is decades old, and Psychology, a field that is over a century old, would just have solved the mystery of how the brain processes and familiarises itself with voices but in reality, we are still learning. Cutting edge Neuroscience and Psychology still focus on understanding processes that day to day is the definition of mundane. Listen in to hear how Dr Holmes' work is finding out that voice processing is anything but boring.

With AI being used across neuroscience we find hundreds of different ways to 'use AI'. In Season 4 of WaterCooler Neuroscience Wilf Nelson talked with world experts to find out what modern AI and computational neuroscience is. In that series, we found one of the best ways to use AI is to make artificial versions of our experiments and see if they work when only the models we create are running the show, no sneaky helping hand from nature to get our experiment to come up positive. In this episode of BTAB Jordana and Wilf are continuing that thought by talking about a paper that was first run in mice in a lab and then re-runs in a computer with a simulation to see if the theoretical model scientists said was running the mice brain could do all the stimulating activities. Listen in to what modern-day AI is really doing.

Art is not typically an area of study for Neuroscience and Psychology given the fields' preference for simple experimental stimuli and as little interpretation as possible. Dr Vessel however explores how people experience and are influenced by art using experimental Psychology. We want to better understand not just how people report interacting with Art but then how Art alters their behaviour, thoughts and perceptions in the same way we would test anything else in a professional lab. We bring you Dr Vessel's work on understanding how artwork can inspire people to write stories.

Brains Talking about Brains is not just a show about human or even animal psychology. It is a show about Psychology in all its forms and now that can include AI psychology. AI are not conscious and thinking as sci-fi movies would define them but AI that runs phones, servers and statistics programs do have regular patterns for how they handle information. Those patterns can form the basis for understanding the psychology of a thing and in this episode, Jordana and Wilf are talking about a theoretical paper that tries to explain the weirdness of reported human dreams through a quirk of AI data processing. Because science must be falsifiable Wilf and Jordana set out to see if this theory can be tested with an experiment, if it can be falsified and where that might just not be possible right now.

EEG caps have been around in one form or another for almost a century and have drastically increased the ways that brain science can be done through a cheap, reliable and data rich method. However, EEGs are usually confined to university and hospital labs with arduous sets up nothing like how movies can make EEG experiments appear. Today I am talking with Dr Jyoti Mishra about how her work is taking an easy to use cap and bringing it to schools, outpatients and those in isolated situations so Neuroscience can better understand people who don't fit the usual participant criteria.

To finish off this series of WaterCooler Neuroscience we are talking about why AI probably shouldn't be a general intelligence. General intelligence is what humans have, we can turn our minds to anything we chose and learn new things with success based on how intelligent we are overall. AI does not work like this; an AI is trained to be good at one thing but fail. Look no further than asking a chess expert to make a cheese sandwich versus a chess AI, the chess AI can't even be spoken to. We talk about why many specific AI is probably the best route for the future rather than a general AI that tries to mimic human behaviour. If you aren't convinced consider your phone is already a collection of very specific AI instead of one general AI.

There are things our brains do that are so natural and obvious we don't even notice our brain does it. One of those things is the perception that we have a body, even if you feel pain or that something is slightly off with your body you always perceive that you have a body. In this episode, we are talking about how researchers are working to understand how our brain is constantly measuring our limbs to keep track of what they are and what state they are in and more importantly we are learning how AI can help us replicate those signals in amputees. If you want to see the future of brain-body research and prosthetics then tune in.

In Season 4 of WaterCooler Neuroscience, we have spoken a lot about the abstract ways to use AI to understand the brain. In this episode, we talk with Michael J Frank about a more grounded, clinical use of AI in understanding the study and uses of dopamine across the brain. What is dopamine? What do disorders of dopamine teach us and how can we better understand it in this modern age of neuroscience?

Computational Neuroscience is a toolbox for researchers to use on whatever they want. AI can mean using a basic analysis program all the way to programs that can simulate and create new faces or new models of information. In this episode, we talk with Thomas Carlson about how to build a modern computational neuroscience lab from the ground up.

Even simple phones can tell if they are looking at a face or at least a photo of a face, and that is thanks to developments in teaching AI how to understand the makeup of a human face. This technology however originated in labs as researchers tried to use the enormous data processing capabilities of AI to understand how humans see faces. In this episode, we talk with Nikolaus Kriegeskorte about how his labs use AI to study the many different ways we see images. We also learn about how AI competition works, many AI can be made to do a task but we need to test and understand which is better to make better machines and programs in the future.

Computational Neuroscience has had many massive claims in the future mostly around being able to disprove free will or use AI code to mindread what people are thinking in courtrooms and airports. In this episode, we bring you the neuroscientist who is the basis for many of these claims, and he never said any of those things. We delve into what we can really say using AI about how people make decisions and what they think about by talking with John about his illustrious career.

Burnout is a topical psychological condition but many people in the workplace do not meet the criteria for burnout, according to psychologists. Burnout has a very set definition and while psychology recognises stress, disenfranchisement, cynicism and the desire to leave work.... are any of those by themselves burnout? Jordana and Wilf break down for you how academics define burnout, engagement and how those ideas move through to psychiatric help.

AI are always in the news and regularly credited with amazing advancements in the data processing. AI has become so capable of handling complex data the field of computational neuroscience is now flourishing around the world. This series will talk with experts on computational neuroscience to see how AI and brains are coming together. We start the series with a discussion with John Laird and while he is not a neuroscientist he does make AI from the ground up. John is an expert in making AI and he talks with us about what they can and can't do, what he uses them for in his lab and why he isn't worried about AI trying to kill us all.

Boredom is an incredibly powerful human emotion and drives us to not rest, to try new things and is the power behind our curiosity. Dr Erin Westgate is an expert on what boredom is, how it manifests in our lives and what is it that triggers boredom. If you are interested in this show you should also check out Dr Nick Buttrick's work on S2 EP2 of WCNeuro where Nick talks about his work with boredom which was with Erin a few years ago (https://watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk/wc-neuro-season-two/) Sponsored by I Know What Scares You.

Jordana and Wilf talk in-depth about a recent neuroscience review of hundreds of papers that show that the biological differences between men and women when it comes to brains are minimal if there are at all. We talk about how size differences can result in false reports of sex differences, how poor study design results in bad results and most important why very complex neuroscience shouldn't be boiled down into one headline. Listen in for our discussion about sex, brains, size and even maths, language and all those things you've been told are different just because of a chromosome.

Sound is caused by vibration, something has to be moving to cause sound so when you are hunting sound is very important because it tells you things your eyes are going to miss. Humans can track sounds, we all know that, but how do we track sounds and what would be the best ways to track sounds? It turns you you need some mathematicians to make your code, some engineers to build a very impressive sound chamber and then psychologists and neuroscientists to make sense of the whole thing. Our guest on this episode walks us through it.

This episode delves into the world of neuroscience posters which are shorthand for presenting research to the academic world. Posters provide a way for scientists to have their work reviewed for a conference but it is not as rigorous as an academic journal. In this episode, Jordana and Wilf are looking at how the neurotransmitter serotonin and varieties of serotonin receptors can alter how people score on professional personality scores. Jordana breaks down her experiences with people who are on the most extreme scores of sensitivity and Wilf talks about how academic personality tools differ a lot from those available both online and for business.