WaterCooler Neuroscience

Say you are the kind of person who is trustworthy enough to be given a lab with dozens of research mice. Also, say that you are the kind of person who does good science and tests male and female rats in equal measure to test if chromosomes and sex hormones might cause a difference in how the brain works. Then say you were smart enough to realise some drugs may alter memory. Well if all of those things are true then you are Dr Raul Andero Gali and the guest of this episode talking about how to better understand why certain drugs change the behaviour of mice when it comes to forming memories. This episode in particular talks about neurodiversity, that through these drugs we can understand how male and female brains are different in their structure but that doesn't mean they are different in how they function in everyday life. Curious, then tune in.

Mindblindness, or aphantasia, is the neurological inability to visually imagine anything really. People with mindblindness can imagine and as far as we know have no other cognitive deficits, that being a scientific deficit which just means something is missing not wrong. In this episode, we delve into the topic of mindblindness, why it has only recently been studied and how mindblindness can be seen in everyday life. most importantly we talk about why as psychologists we are totally ok with it.

Alzheimer's is a form of dementia known around the world for its powerful ability to remove personality, cognitive function and your sense of time and space based on the information around you. Alzheimer's has been studied for decades and now with incredible datasets we are using modern AI techniques to better understand that Alzheimer's isn't just one disease, it has many forms and many different progressions through the brain. As part of the toolbox of neuroscientists and psychologists around the world, let's see what AI has to say about Alzheimer's.

Brain-Computer Interface, or using the older term cybernetics, is a field now that doesn't care about implants but instead uses safe machines like EEG and fMRI to study patterns of brain activity that computers can interpret into commands. In this episode, we talk about cutting edge research that wants to know if imaging motor movement the best way to control a machine or can we use our memories and emotions to better effect? If you haven't listened to Episode 6 of Brains Talking about Brains I would recommend it because it provides an introduction to this subject, also see Think Fast Season 2 Episode 21 with Michiel Spape for his work on teaching machines to understand human brains.

Before you think I am talking about human females and this is a discussion of gender or culture, no. This is about females of almost any species around the world from insects to us. Dr Freyberg delves into how the brain uses dopamine and makes sure it doesn't turn into a poison in our brains. Females, however, handle this process very differently from males and we go into what that means for our brains, and why that doesn't mean we see totally different cognition.

In 1997 Cognitive Neuroscience was in its infancy and there was much more about the brain we didn't understand than we do. The goal of understanding how brain waves and neural function linked was the dream of neuroscientists around the world. In this paper, we look at the odd finding which is that when you use EEG it can be very hard to tell if someone is moving their arm or just imagining moving their arm. We talk about how this is a foundational study in the world of neuroscience, its applications even today and how it paved the way for the future.

Bethany Teachman is this episode's guest bringing her expertise in both teaching people how to treat anxiety and her research into the different ways our brain processes anxiety. Along with her, research Bethany talks to our host Wilf Nelson about the differences in anxiety disorders, introspection and health worries. If you ever wanted to know how modern-day clinics view anxiety and what inspires them to try to help then this is the interview you've been waiting to hear. Spoiler alert, the goal is always to make you be the best version of yourself that you want to be.

In this episode, we delve into a topic that is very discussed by Psychology but rarely discussed by Neuroscience. What is dreaming when we are not concerned about the reports of people dreaming, what can we understand from studying the brain instead of the mind and how is memory involved in the contents of our dreams? Ultimately what parts of dreaming are available to scientific study, and what parts aren't and here we talk about how psychologists are ok with that.

Michael Spape is returning but not to talk about deep fakes. Instead, his work on teaching machines how to read EEG data is now being used to allow people to control machines in real-time. Spape walks us through the earliest definitions of cybernetics all the way to the modern Brain-Computer-Interface technologies that are letting people move things with their mind. This episode however highlights the limits of the technology. Spape's work is cutting edge but you might be more than a little surprising what we can do and all the things we can't.

In this episode of Brains Talking about Brains we are talking about state and trait anxiety, are you anxious as a person or just going through an anxious period? What does that do to the brain in the long term and this week Jordana and Wilf are talking about a paper that studies the areas in the brain that develop more brain cells and which develop more connections.

In this episode, I am interviewing Dr Michael Spape on how his work into making AI that could recognise faces because of the different ways humans process faces lead to deep fakes. Michael walks us through how using EEG caps to process the brain's signals when seeing different types of faces generated data that humans cannot understand, but AI can. He tells us how he built and trained these intelligent programs to understand the neural signals behind faces and then what could be done with these completed but limited AI to start making new faces that haven't existed anywhere else. You will have undoubtedly heard about deep fakes, this episode shows you the labs and research that inspired them.

Brains Talking About Brains is approaching the topic of pain this week. Jordana and Wilf are looking at a paper where controlled and manageable pain, a small shock to the leg, is controlled not through medication or meditation but instead a simple memory task. How much can we understand the brain's ability to control pain? In this episode, we also look at how it is not just the brain that can have its pain signals altered by doing a memory task but even the spinal cord.

Smells generate some of the most powerful memory experiences but we don't know why. This episode explores not only why smells do generate such powerful memories but why are they more powerful than other senses? To understand that we need to not only be able to measure the memory centres of our brain but be able to find a way to compare senses which are in many ways incomparable.

In the second episode of the new Brains Talking About Brains Jordana and Wilf are talking about the topic of how new cells that were grown in an adult (rat) brain were actually the cells that control the rest of the memory centres in the brain. Traditional thinking would say that new neurons are controlled and 'educated' by older neurons so these new neurons fit in with how the brain has worked in the past but this episode talks about how we can see very small populations of newly grown neurons running huge areas of the memory centres of the brain involving millions of neurons. At the end of the show, we also discuss what this means for human research since most human imaging techniques are not capable of studying such small groups of neurons in a lab.

Think Fast is a show entirely focused on the brain but it is just taken for granted that brains will grow and form into conscious fully aware people. But how does that happen? This episode brings you Dr. Robert Carrillo and his work in flies to better understand how neurons in the very earliest stages of development learn to link up with each other and why it doesn't really matter what neurons they link up so long as they are of the right class of cell.

Introducing Brains Talking About Brains, a series where WaterCooler Neuroscience host Wilf Nelson and psychologist and practitioner Jordana Adler meet you at their virtual conference to talk about psychology old and new to show you what a psychologist sees. The first episode of this new series is talking about rats and if they have a network formally called the Default Mode Network. In humans this network can do introspection, reflection, daydreaming and many of the most complex and deep tasks which many consider 'the most human'. This network however has also been proposed in rats. What does that mean though? Are rats daydreaming and philosophizing or do we need a psychologist perspective to see how the same kind of network may do very different things in human vs rat brains? Tune in to find out and see what a psychologist sees.

Psychopaths are one of the most dangerous personality disorders that occur in humans and they are famous across the world for both real-life and fictional stories about the dangers of psychopaths. On top of that Machiavellian personality disorder is not quite psychopathy but is a disorder where people will use and hurt others for their own goals. These kind of personality disorders are obviously disorders that we would want to keep away from science-fiction-like technologies of mind uploading and immortality in a virtual world but Michael's work has found out that they are actually the kind of people most interested in getting to live forever in a machine. In this episode, we look at what Psychology can tell us about future technology and where it provides important warnings.

Like many neuroscientists, my experience with the brain is centred mostly around blood, how blood feeds the neurons. fMRI, while an amazing tool, works to understand changing blood flow which we argue is affected by neurons but our understanding of how blood flow works in the brain is imperfect. To better understand the blood, and then the neurons, we need to study the architecture by which the brain is supplied with new blood. You will have seen photos of the brain's arteries at some point in your life but today we are talking about capillaries that are smaller than a millimetre and neurons are never more than a few microns away from a capillary. The trickest with studying something that small is normal microscopes don't cut it, and the usual techniques of electron microscopy involve killing the animal we study. Today's episode is about 2-photon microscopy, a relatively new technique that doesn't require the animal to die and instead lets us study calm, usually peacefully sleeping rodents to understand how t

Jordana Adler is a psychologist and has worked in neurofeedback clinics. In this episode, she brings her expertise to our academia and industry series to discuss what it is like working with neuroscience in the field. Jordana also discusses her choice to not go into academic psychology based on the advice of her parents who are both professors. We are going to talk about her training, the ways she has used neuroscience in her profession and what she is doing now. Look out for more from Jordana in the new series Brains Talking About Brains coming to the WaterCooler Neuroscience network in May.

For most people the concept of anaesthetic is routine, it is just something that doctors give to people undergoing a medical procedure and everything will be normal again in a few hours. For some people though the injuries they sustain are so life-threatening that the body cannot experience any stress during recovery and a medically induced coma is needed to keep the patient safe. This is common practice in intensive care units all around the world and saves the lives of those who otherwise would not be able to cope with almost any stimulus or activity. This episode is talking about what happens to the brain during that time. How does the brain handle being in an environment where nothing is happening, no TV shows to watch, no streets to walk down or friends to talk to? Our brain craves experience so what can we learn about the brain's response to extended periods of no experience?