WaterCooler Neuroscience

Human's process faces almost better than anything else, we can even see faces when there isn't a face there which is called Face pareidolia and why people claim to see faces in the sky or in the sea. Our brains try to see faces everywhere, even where they are no faces. But on occasion this malfunctions worse than just coffee foam oddly looking like a cartoon face and can result in conditions where people can no longer recognise faces or see faces as distorted. Our guest today is an expert on a condition that makes people see faces as distorted but more importantly, this very rare condition allowed Jorge to better understand if we remember faces only based on perspectives we have seen faces in the past or if we store a 3D representation of every face we can remember.

In this episode, I talk to Dr Ashley Juavinett on her book 'So you want to be a Neuroscientist' which covers not only the difficulties, promise and secrets of being a neuroscientist. My interview with Ashley not only covers the topics of her book but also her inspirations and everything she would have added to the book after it was completed. Becoming a neuroscientist is one of the most complex but also diverse scientific paths a person can take in the modern academic world and this book provides an excellent introduction so that not every step you take is blind. For the rest listen to the interview.

Epilepsy is a condition that is most simply understood as causing blackouts and seizures but from a neurological point of view what is happening is a mass activation of neurons with very little control which effectively overloads our sensory and motor centres and can cause unconsciousness as the brain can't fire in the ways that allow for a normal conscious experience. Episodes about epilepsy normally include talking to both doctors and patients on the biology and lived experiences of those with epilepsy. Today we are talking about maths, what is epilepsy without the brain? What can maths show us which other fields can't? This episode explores mathematical neuroscience and the contributions that a chaos mathematician is bringing to the squishy organic world of neuroscience.

Dr Rafiq Huda's work in human decision-making processes have elucidated the process of flexible decision making across rodent and human brains. However, recently Rafiq has risen to the ranks of having his own lab and this means he has spent the last year transitioning from a pure researcher to the joint job of researcher and lab manager. Running a lab is very similar to running a business, just without any products to sell or regular income, and here Rafiq gives his insights into how scientists have to transition into managers handling budgets, not just research projects. 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

It is a question in Psychology and Neuroscience how people who are constantly adventurous and rigidly stuck to what they know are both using the dopamine systems found in the midbrain. How can two seemingly opposite patterns of behaviour come from the same source and why whenever a discussion about the brain starts is it always somehow focused on dopamine. Michael J Frank is an expert on the dopamine systems in the human brain and brings his research and decades of experience to help us understand what the dopamine system is actually doing here. 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

In this series on Academia and Industry we are moving to the other end of the spectrum and instead of talking with scientists about how they integrate into business we are approaching CEO of the Lark Group and how he works with scientists. Kirk provides insights into his working relationships with scientists and what he thinks are both the best practices for starting a new partnership and how to get the best out of both parties with their different training and background. 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

Mind-wandering or daydreaming is one of the most common activities that happen in a day. It is almost impossible to not eventually have your mind wander off into thoughts about the past or fantasies about the future. In this episode, I interview Dr Julia Kam on her research into mind-wandering and how we can study the major network involved, the default mode network. We talk about what the default mode network does, how we can study it and where the limits of the field are with such a newly studied network. 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

Artificial intelligence is used regularly in neuroscientist with programs that are able to process enormous amounts of data and alter their own parameters to 'learn'. AI is even used to identify different objects just through a camera and the applications of visual identification are becoming mainstream with the use of such programs in self-driving cars. The question is how do we pick between AI that seem to work equally at first pass. Well the answer is we show them psychedelic images. To find out why that would ever work tune into this episode of Think Fast. 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

For most people, the heights of Professorship and CSO/CEO are dreams for a future year. Today we are talking with Shaun Fickling, a researcher at HealthTechConnex, and one of the researchers who helped with NeuroCatch Inc. Shaun only recently finished his PhD and brings us the insights from someone who spent years in academia and has now entered the ground floor of corporate scientific endeavours. He offers his advice and insights for what the modern PhD researcher needs.

In the second part of my interview with Dr Paul Eastwick, we delve into the idea of compatibility. It is accepted in human culture that when two people choose to be together or are chosen to be together, there is a level of compatibility. We accept we fit better with some people, we don't fit with others, and while perfection is not possible, it is best to find someone who compliments us. This interview is going to knock that concept on the head a little. Machine learning last time poured into what parts of relationship questionnaires really inform us about relationships, and now we are going to be finding out are people compatible when they first meet or does a relationship's success depend on if you become compatible together? 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

Today's episode is with Dr Paul Eastwick discussing how we can use AI/Machine learning to start to understand the beginning of romantic relationships and why some people start to stay together and others don't. This is a traditionally near-impossible task for humans to figure out, there are thousands of variables that go into two people meeting and forming the relationship they will have and humans are not very good when we have to process lots of variables at once. We get bias, we pick things we want to be important and ignore things we don't like. Machines don't have that problem and machines understand data in very different ways, in this episode we look at how machines process relationship questionnaires and what is really important for why two people hook up. 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

In this episode our series on Academia and Industry continues with the next part of my interview with Professor Ryan D'Arcy and how people can begin to transition from academic laboratories to industry laboratories. What challenges and what benefits lie ahead? 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 go to our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

This episode concludes my interview with Dr Nicole Barbaro where we discuss how fully formed and ending relationships change in both the anxiety to commit and the anxiety to separate. We also talk about how psychology views relationships and the influences that other scientific fields have given to psychology when we try to study romance. This episode will also continue our discussion of what myths and memes about relationships are true but usually with very small effects that do not mean the different sexes and genders are never going to see eye to eye.

Nicole Barbaro brings you the modern psychological view of relationships; how do humans bond, where do we stumble and in the end how do we end relationships? You probably know all of these things from your own life but when we are talking about science it has to be replicable, it has to work for the whole population and we normally want it to survive a statistical analysis or two. I cannot promise a flattering view of relationships in this episode, but I can promise the scientific view.

Many PhDs and university researchers will leave their positions after five years to move onto corporate office and laboratory jobs which in academia is known as moving to industry. This episode is the start of a new mini-series coming out fortnightly on Mondays where I break down what the move from academic labs to corporate jobs looks like and where the prizes are greater and what traps lie along the way. Joining me is returning guest Prof Ryan D'Arcy who is both a CSO and Professor bringing his rare perspective on both sides of the debate to see what bridges the two worlds

Today's episode is with Dr Awais Aftab who is a practising psychiatrist in the U.S.A. Today he is talking about what someone can expect from the American psychiatric service in its many different forms from the state level to the countrywide federal level. We also talk about how care is approached when treating people with psychiatric disorders that can be treated as part of everyday life and what treatment is like for those with conditions so severe they have to be committed involuntarily for their own safety. This episode does not discuss ways to improve the service or discusses if the current systems are 'correct', the only intention is to talk about what is there right now.

Parkinson's is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes the loss of movement in people. The dopamine circuits that span the brain begins to deteriorate and a person will become more rigid, lose fine motor control and eventually even aspects of cognitive and emotional processing. Much is being done to treat Parkinson's around the world but today we are studying how to better understand the beginning of the disease. Prof. Borghammer has the amazing title of being a Nuclear Medic and uses radioactive isotopes to measure the metabolism of dopamine not just across the brain but also in our intestines. The intestines have a complex neural structure of their own and research spanning decades is now showing that dopamine degeneration may begin outside of the brain.

Emotions are a bit of a minefield when you run a science podcast. Emotions are constant for human beings so everyone knows what they are and can talk about their emotions all day but scientists have very precise ways to discuss emotions. This means you end up talking a lot about terms and techniques that seem to just be making an everyday thing needlessly complex. In this episode, we do a bit of myth-busting and talk about what all the terms from emotion and mood through to valence and affect mean. We also talk about how our guest studies emotion data from a sleep deprivation lab and the surprising findings we find what shows how we act and think doesn’t always match how we feel or say we feel.

This episode we are talking about the kinds of moral behaviours that children show as they grow up. Children develop their morals over time and one big question is whether children are moral because they want to be, to uphold altruism and Justice or because they are afraid of being punished and would like to get a reward for getting someone else in trouble. We don't exactly know is the clear question and that is what this episode is going to explore. We are talking with Meltem Yucel about her work on how we can understand if children are or are not moral in the way we would judge adults. There is also some interesting extra content on the 'Theory of Puppets' which was a fun extra I had during recording