#607 Nicole Prause: Sex, Porn, and Addiction
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»
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»
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»
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»
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»
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»
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»
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»
Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel is Associate Professor of Psychology and Associate Director for Communications at Vanderbilt Brain Institute at Vanderbilt University. She is interested in comparative neuroanatomy, cellular composition of brains, brain morphology, brain evolution, metabolic cost of body and brain, sleep requirement across species, feeding time, and really interested in how all of these are tied together. She writes about neuroscience and science in general for the public. She is the author of The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable (MIT Press, 2016). More»
Dr. Kevin Mitchell is Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He is interested in the development of connectivity in the brain, specifically in how this process is controlled by genes and how mutations in such genes affect the connectivity of neuronal circuits, influence behavior and perception and contribute to disease. His research group uses genetic approaches in the mouse to address these questions, and they are also involved in collaborative research looking at the genetics and phenotypic manifestations of synaesthesia and schizophrenia in humans. He’s the author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. More»
Dr. Michael Anderson is Rotman Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Science, Core member at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, and Core member at the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario. For 2012-13, Dr. Anderson is a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford University. His primary areas of research include an account of the evolution of the cortex via exaptation of existing neural circuitry (the "massive redeployment hypothesis"); the role of behavior, and of the brain's motor-control areas, in supporting higher-order cognitive functions; the foundations of intentionality (the connection between objects of thought and things in the world); and the role of self-monitoring and self-control in maintaining robust real-world agency. More»