Water Cooler Neuroscience

WaterCooler Neuroscience is continuing our episodes talking about the most interesting papers from the recent NIH confernece which Jordana Adler attended. We are talking about which signals in specific the amygdala is firing at when PTSD patients are exposed to an array of fearful stimuli and how this kind of experiment can only be done in certain laboratories. We also discuss how our brain's connectivity changes as we get older and how that effects healthy ageing particularly for those under and over 50 years old. If you would like to see the poster Wilf and Jordana discuss please use the links https://brainmeeting2022.ipostersessions.com/Default.aspx?s=65-A1-05-F6-3A-57-CE-FC-81-7D-BC-46-A8-64-DF-C5, and https://brainmeeting2022.ipostersessions.com/Default.aspx?s=5B-F5-BB-EB-AF-AA-0B-8F-18-2A-9C-72-70-9D-09-19 if you cannot get access please request it from an academic/research institution if possible. This episode is sponsored by BrainFx. BrainFx Assessments have helped researchers, scientists, and healthcare professionals conduct cutting-edge research and understand the early and subtle effects of brain disorders of all types on a person's ability to function in real life. Find out more at www.BrainFx.com

WaterCooler Neuroscience is back in 2022 with a new format bringing both Wilf Nelson and Jordana Adler. This episode will be bringing you some of the most interesting posters and papers from the NIH conference in America which Jordana attended recently. Wilf and Jordana discuss research into how much can we really assume that rodent and human brains are comparable, especially given billions of dollars of research ever year is done on rodent neuroscience assuming it helps us further our understanding of the human brain. If you would like to see the poster Wilf and Jordana discuss please use the link https://brainmeeting2022.ipostersessions.com/Default.aspx?s=C8-F2-5A-84-54-F6-70-33-66-52-44-AB-58-13-50-CA, if you cannot get access please request it from an academic/research institution if possible. This episode is sponsored by BrainFx. BrainFx Assessments have helped researchers, scientists, and healthcare professionals conduct cutting-edge research and understand the early and subtle effects of brain disorders of all types on a person's ability to function in real life. Find out more at www.BrainFx.com

This episode finishes the mini-series about Bethany Teachman's lab by interviewing Bethany Teachman herself to talk about her role in running a professional academic lab

This episode continues the series from December 2021 by talking with Jeremy Eberle about his experience working in Bethany Teachman's lab.

In this episode, Jordana and Wilf talk about what the research into eye movement says about how people are thinking. Why would we want to study eye movement and how does it compare to other methods?

This episode finalises the series of episodes where Jordana Adler interviews Wilf Nelson on his PhD, the thesis that was produced and the journey he had learned to conduct, design and analyse experiments.

Episode 4 brings you the first of Wilf's episodes that were designed from conception by himself. His work leads him to try to understand how inhibition works when we have multiple competing senses active but now we are going further. This episode explores how the brain uses inhibition when it both knows something is coming up and when it doesn't. Wilf's research lead him away from using EEG and fMRI but instead to using a machine called magnetoencephalography or MEG. Wilf talks about why he had to train with this machine and what new data this brought to his expanding collection of research.

The next episode in the series on Wilf Nelson's PhD thesis is brought to you like season 5 of WaterCooler Neuroscience. In this episode, Wilf talks about this first experiment that just didn't work the way he wanted. Jordana and Wilf talk about their experiences running EEG experiments and tests and what experiments that don't work can tell us in science. In fact, this experiment not working the way it was supposed to be even more interesting because it is the same experiment as chapter 2 but this time is done with an EEG cap instead of an fMRI machine.

In this episode of WaterCooler Neuroscience, we discuss Wilf's first experimental chapter of his thesis. This is when a scientist prepares an experiment and in their dissertation will write a chapter to explain and describe that experiment to other scientists. This experiment is looking at how the brain can decide to inhibit or 'turn off' regions that are competing with what we want to be doing. In reality, the brain can't turn anything off, it is more like putting a state where it is just ticking over but ready to go if it needs to. Wilf talks about his experience of designing the experiment while Jordana Adler is the host and brings her insight from the world of neurofeedback.

This episode is a special one because it is the first part of a five-episode series of WaterCooler Neuroscience on Wilf Nelson's, the host's, PhD. In this episode, Jordana Adler from BTAB is the host and interviewing Wilf on his PhD from starting through to all of the experimental chapters of his thesis. The first episode covers a lot of the questions that scientists get asked when they start their PhD and probes what it means to be trained as a scientist. Listen now to learn about Wilf Nelson going from Wilf Nelson to Wilf Nelson, PhD.

Think Fast is continuing its deep dive into Prof. Teachman's lab to better understand how multiple different research projects are run at the same time and give you a better look at what a proper academic lab is like. In this episode we are talking about some of the data analysis that goes on behind the scenes looks like. For any lab, the analysis of data is just as important as acquiring it but instead of having a set pipeline up and running data analysis can take many forms. We talk with one of the lab's researchers to see what their day-to-day looks like and how they turn anonymised data into useable findings.

Over December Jordana and Wilf have been talking about what science fiction and more specifically last episode SOMA can show about modern psychology and neuroscience. In this episode, we wrap up this mini-series and talk about how an organic AI would work. What are the bounds of an AI and how in SOMA do begin to see what a very non-human, very hard to understand AI looks like? On top of this Wilf thinks this is one of the best representations of AI to date.

Think Fast is doing a deep dive into the lab of Professor Bethany Teachman who has been on the show before and we are talking about how her lab studies anxiety. Normally on Think Fast, we will talk about only one research project or one show but labs regularly work on multiple projects at a time once they are established. The next four episodes are going to be an expose on what Prof. Teachman's lab is doing and how it is really very similar to a large commercial lab in its day-to-day running.

Mind-uploading has been one of the great visions of science ever since the boom of cyberpunk science fiction and with it has been the belief that since 'brains are like computers' (they aren't) that moving our consciousness from our brains to a computer is just a matter of moving some software around. In this episode, Wilf and Jordana continue to talk about science fiction throughout December but this time focusing on a game called SOMA. SOMA is a video game that provides an in-depth discussion into mind uploading and according to the hosts is one of the best representations of where it can go right, and very very wrong.

Today's episode brings you more from the world of computational neuroscience or trying to recreate parts of the brain in a computer. Brains were once thought of as just as a pile of jelly and neurons were neurons, blood was blood and support cells were called glial (for glue). Modern neuroscience has a much more advanced understanding of how the brain is composed of many different types of neurons, glial and microglial as well as complex systems to provide oxygen and nutrients and remove waste. One question however does keep popping up, why do we have so many different types of neurons? Why isn't one all-purpose neuron the way our brains evolved? In this episode, we talk about how computer models allow us to test tests that would take millions of years through evolution in the lab but a computer can do it in a few days.

Our two-part discussion about how psychologists view science fiction continues and this part is where it gets really weird. Wilf and Jordana talk about how to rank different kinds of AI, how well do movie AI match real-world AI and what happens to psychology when we try to apply it to totally non-human minds?

Brains Talking About Brains is a show where two psychologists/neurosciences talk about science papers in our virtual conference. This week however we are expanding into the other great love that all scientists have, that is talking about science fiction as if it was real. In this two-part discussion, Wilf and Jordana talk about movies and games to discuss what they see as psychologists when they watch some of the most popular science fiction around and what science-based wanderings does that lead to?

Being in the zone is called a flow state in Psychology/Neuroscience, it is the state of focusing on one task to the point that information from the outside world can not even reach our conscious awareness. Team Flow is the very specific circumstance where we are in the zone or in a state of flow but we can specifically not ignore our teammates and integrate the information from other people while keeping that high level of focus. We also learn how professional video gamers are a perfect population for testing this phenomenon which is only a new field to academic study.

Inhibition is a fundamental function of the brain, our brain can't always be on. In this episode we talk with our guest, Dr Corette Wierenga, to better understand how our neurons can be activated in a way that starts to promote the growth of inhibitory connections. This is how our brains balance themselves, it is a method for the brain to work in real-time to alter the strength of different signals and ensure that no one signal gets too strong in the brain.

Tea is an almost universal drink across the world with tea trading having shaped huge portions of history. This episode won't be that grand but the hosts are going to break down a recent study that investigated how heavy tea drinkers have their brain networks altered in both the structure and function over the course of decades of drinking. Wilf and Jordana talk about what you can expect from drinking tea and when claims just need to be left alone

Music doesn't always have to be emotional, music can just be a boring collection of notes and yet that is very rare. Even the beginning melody of a sound can bring about an enormous range of emotions for people, depending on the context, social situations and culture. This episode brings you a discussion of how different music was used to colour the perceptions and moods of participants watching a short video. The hosts unpack what we can tell about how we understand music both with brain data and without, and we also discuss how some brain imaging findings can be very deceptive.

You may not expect the babbling of baby bats to be a topic for a neuroscience podcast but this week we are talking about how social calls in bats go through clear developmental stages without bats ever teaching one another. Bats learn calls, both for hunting, crying out and social calls not through being taught like humans are but by just copying others around them. Our guest Dr Ahana Aurora Fernandez has spent years in the jungles of Panama learning how bats of both genders learn the male bat mating call but then only males use it once they get to maturity. What is behind this mystery? To find out more tune in or check out our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

Everyone knows that humans have two hemispheres and there are famous cases of brains being split and conditions like Alien Hand Syndrome developing which bring forth arguments about if we have two or more personalities in our heads. Birds also have two hemispheres but their hemispheres are less connected than mammals and this leads to unusual differences in information processing. Quails are particularly special in having their hemispheres be more separate in a neurological sense before they mature and after maturity have better hemisphere communication. This means quails can prefer certain eyes, and by extension certain hemispheres, for processing information. Wilf and Jordana attempt to unpack this very confusing line of research

Our brains tell stories about everything, from how we got to work to how we have spent the last decade of our life. In this episode, we are talking about how our brains and more specifically the hippocampus tracks the way that characters in stories move from scene to scene. Brendan walks us through his research and also how we can understand the pattern of activity we see for the main character versus the many different patterns of activity that we find for the side characters in the background. To find out more tune in or check out our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk

Crying is a normal human function seen in people all across the world but there is quite a bit of difference in how and when people cry depending on their physiological, psychology, culture and gender. In this episode, we unpack the psychology and neuroscience behind crying to see what the research says about crying, and what is just 'common knowledge'

A channel update for October 2021 by Wilf Nelson

Hi, Wilf Nelson has just completed his thesis and is taking a short break to complete his PhD. We will be returning with new episodes in October and if you want to let us know if any topics are particularly interesting or important than check out the website at www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk and message us there.

This episode brings the conclusion of Wilf's interview with Dr Bimal Lakhani. Wilf and Bimal focus in this part of the interview on how corporate culture can clash with the scientific method, and how common that can be. They also talk about what the difference is in key skills when working for a university and when working for a company. It boils down to one key concept, soft skills. Find out why in a company lab having well developed soft skills is the key to working well, and it isn't just to play politics.

For the next part of September's releases in the Academia and Industry series, we are talking with Dr Bimal Lakhani. A postdoctoral researcher who was trained in universities but moved to work in a corporate lab. He talks about his experience of moving from the labs he trained into labs that focus on product development and how he views himself compared to the other scientists who are now employed full time by university labs. Bimal is also a senior scientist and is as high up as it gets without being a chief or board member. That means Bimal is the equivalent of your future boss for any scientist looking to make the jump. Wilf, gently, grills Bimal on what it is like to run a corporate lab and how his staff work differently in that environment compared to their PhDs.

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. 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

We bring you the conclusion of the interview with Mohammed Ali and how the business that you start is very unlikely to be the business you are running year on year. We talk about how the development of ideas and projects is very natural for scientists, so why wouldn't it be the same in business? We talk about how to accept the changes from the publicly funded world to the private world and actually the great freedoms that Mohammed sees when you take the plunge.

September is bringing the return of the academia and industry series as many students and academics end their contracts and move on from universities, both voluntarily and due to circumstance. This interview brings you the first part of Wilf's discussion with Mohammed Ali who is an expert in helping scientists take their research and ideas from the lab into corporate ventures. You'd be surprised to hear it isn't that different. You are still the one driving your own work, relying on your intellect and imagination to see things others don't and handling almost everything yourself which really isn't too far away from the standard lecturer's life. Mohammed also explains where those wanting to make the jump need to appreciate the differences. This isn't the usual content of the network but the last year and a half have seen unprecedented numbers of researchers leave universities and this is one of the key options.

There are definitely animals in the world that are conscious and aware, at least we can prove it to the same standard as any other human we can't talk to. There are also some animals, and other creatures from different kingdoms that we are not conscious of, again at least as far as we currently study consciousness. The usual method has been to assume a hierarchy with humans at the top, dogs a bit below, rodents below that and jellyfish even lower. This episode brings to you a recent scientific debate that such a hierarchy may not be wrong but for scientists is probably useless. We talk about the new dimensions of consciousness that are being put forward and how some animals excel in one area but fail in another. We must try to find a better way to understand how animals experience the world and do that as best as we can without using the lens of human experience. 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 the final of the shorts from S4 of WCNeuro. In this episode we are talking with Dr Giulio Rognini about how his work helps us to understand why our limbs feel like ours, why prosthetics even as responsive as human arms don't feel like ours and what we can do to fix that with very safe implants and AI that are no smarter than your phone. Giulio and Wilf also talk about their experiences with presenting ideas in the scientific community and why they don't think the accusations of gatekeeping are automatically correct but that doesn't always mean academia is the most welcoming or nurturing place. They talk about how science has very specific criteria to be useful across the world and that means critical evaluation and defence are necessary. 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

In this episode, Jordana and Wilf are diving into the world of experimental brain imaging. The paper of today's episode looked into how people can be scanned by an fMRI, an EEG and EROS (or Event-Related Optical Signalling). All of the scanning methods have their strengths, and at times considerable weaknesses but by using them together we can make new ways to scan the brain. Wilf also talks about his experience in an imaging lab and why scanning people with all these machines at once isn't likely to catch on as the standard method of research but it can offer insights for labs to find budget-friendly ways to study the brain. 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 brings you conversations from S4 of WCNeuro that did not make it into the final season. We are talking with Dr Sebastian Musslick on his findings of how mental effort and cognitive limits in humans are probably not best related over to machines. What makes us capable and unique is not a very good model for AI and that means we have to view what we want AI to be in a very different way. Michael J Frank is also back in this episode to talk about how there is a neurological basis for the feeling that earning something yourself is much more rewarding. 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

Free Will has been a philosophical debate for as long as philosophical debates have existed and science has weighed in from time to time. Neuroscience really started its proper discussion of if humans are truly free with the work of Libet in 1985, although even Libet was working off earlier work. That research brought into the public mind the question of it the readiness potential, the charging up of your motor system to fire, could answer if humans are free or not. We are not 37 years after the initial study and new research is not questioning if free will is real, or if neuroscience has ways to answer the question but if the readiness potential is the best way to find out. In this episode, we dive into the methods behind the readiness potential and try to see if it is something from an era of neuroscience that we can replace now.

This month is continuing your shorts from S4 of WCNeuro and bringing you a final snippet from Wilf's interview with John Dylan Haynes. We are talking about how to make artificial intelligence we have to define what intelligence even is, to set our goalpost to reach. John knows of a task force that was set to define intelligence and the result they came up with... well, it's interesting. After that Michael J Frank is back talking about how Parkinson's patients have an unusual pattern of neural behaviour which makes it seem like they are simply not motivated. We break down why this is the case in very specific scientific language and why that really isn't the case in every other context. 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 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?