neuroscience

#641 Robert Barton: The Evolution of the Primate Brain, The Visual Brain, and the Color Red

Jun 20, 2022

Dr. Robert Barton is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Member of the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre at Durham University, UK. He is an evolutionary biologist/anthropologist interested in brains, behavior and cognition, using phylogenetic comparative methods to study how these traits evolved. He developed and tested the 'Visual brain hypothesis' for primate brain size evolution. He is currently interested in the underestimated role of the cerebellum in brain evolution and cognition. He also works on the evolutionary and cultural significance of the color red. More»
#638 Henkjan Honing: The Evolution, Cognition, and Neuroscience of Musicality and Music

Jun 13, 2022

Dr. Henkjan Honing is professor in Music Cognition at both the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He conducts his research under the auspices of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) and the University of Amsterdam's Brain and Cognition (ABC) Center. Dr. Honing is known as a passionate researcher in this new interdisciplinary field that gives us fundamental insights in the cognitive mechanisms underlying musicality. He published several books, including Music Cognition: The Basics (2021, Routledge), The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes Us Musical (2019, The MIT Press)–, and an edited volume with a research agenda on musicality entitled The Origins of Musicality (2018, The MIT Press). More»
#633 Svetlana Rudenko: Music Perception and Cognition, Consciousness, and Synaesthesia

Jun 2, 2022

Dr. Svetlana Rudenko is a concert pianist and educator bringing a new feeling to the way in which sound, music, and art are perceived and experienced in new media. Key skills in understanding the nuances of cross-modal perception/synaesthesia and converting this knowledge into workable algorithms for multisensory design and digitally enhanced environments of VR/ AR for Education, Mental Health, and Cognitive Musicology. Dr. Rudenko was awarded Dr of Arts from University of Granada, Spain. In addition, she had three years on a Doctorate in the Music Performance program, Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin, Ireland, MMus in Performance from Conservatory of Music and Drama Dublin Institute of Technology, PG Dip in Interactive Digital Media from School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, and is a graduate of Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine, Kiev. More»
#607 Nicole Prause: Sex, Porn, and Addiction

Apr 1, 2022

Dr. Nicole Prause is a neuroscientist researching human sexual behavior, addiction, and the physiology of sexual response. She is also the founder of Liberos LLC, an independent research institute. More»
#606 Peter Sterling - What is health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design (Pt. 1)

Mar 31, 2022

Dr. Peter Sterling is Professor of Neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His broad goal has been to learn how the brain is designed – to understand its functional architecture. His research has spanned the full range of scales, from nanoscopic (synaptic vesicles), to microscopic (neural circuits), to macroscopic (regional neuroanatomy and behavior). His laboratory focused on retinal structure and function, but his theoretical interests extended to basic issues of physiological regulation and behavior, leading to the concept of allostasis. He is the author of books like Principles of Neural Design, and What is health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design. More»
#579 Valerie Hardcastle: The Self, Consciousness, Pain, and Abnormal Psychology

Jan 27, 2022

Dr. Valerie Hardcastle is St. Elizabeth Healthcare Executive Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Vice President for Health Innovation at Northern Kentucky University. Dr. Hardcastle specializes in philosophy of neuroscience/biology, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, and philosophical implications of psychiatry. She researches bioethics/neuroethics, behavioral neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. She teaches metaphysics, science studies, feminist philosophy of science. She is the author of several books, including Locating Consciousness, The Myth of Pain, and Constructing the Self. More»
#570 Brian Knutson: The Neuroscience of Emotions, and Economic Decision-Making

Jan 6, 2022

Dr. Brian Knutson is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. His research focuses on the neural basis of emotional experience and expression. His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience, and to explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and treatment of clinical disorders as well as for economic behavior. He is a fellow of the Academy for Behavioral Medicine Research and the Association for Psychological Science, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and numerous private foundations. More»
#559 Thomas Metzinger: Consciousness, Subjectivity, the Self, and the Ethics of AI

Dec 10, 2021

Dr. Thomas K. Metzinger is senior research professor at the department of philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. From 2014-2019 he was a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College. He is the founder and director of the MIND group and Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany. His research centers on analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. More»
#557 Stephen Fleming - Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness

Dec 6, 2021

Dr. Stephen Fleming is Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging where he leads the Metacognition Group, at University College London. The question that drives most his research is: what supports the remarkable capacity for human self-awareness? To address this question, he combines experimental and theoretical approaches (psychophysics, computational modelling, neuroimaging) to understand how people become self-aware of aspects of their cognition and behavior (such as perception, memory and decision-making), and why such awareness is often impaired in psychiatric and neurological disorders. Current interests focus on understanding contributions of human prefrontal cortex to metacognition, and how self-awareness and social cognition may share a core neurocomputational basis. He is the author of Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness. More»
#508 Scott Small - Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering

Aug 13, 2021

Dr. Scott A. Small is the Director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University, where he is the Boris and Rose Katz Professor of Neurology. He is appointed in the Departments of Neurology, Radiology, and Psychiatry. With an expertise in Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive aging, Dr. Small’s research focuses on the hippocampus, a circuit in the brain targeted by these and other disorders, notably schizophrenia. He has pioneered the development and application of high-resolution functional MRI techniques that can pinpoint parts of the hippocampus most affected by aging and disease. His lab then uses this information to try to identify causes of these disorders. Over the years, his lab has used this ‘top-down’ approach to isolate pathogenic mechanisms related to Alzheimer’s disease, cognitive aging, and schizophrenia. More recently, his lab has used this insight for drug discovery and to develop novel therapeutic interventions, some of which are currently being tested in patients. He is the author of Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering. More»