CogNation

Joe and Rolf talk to Dr. Aric Prather, a clinical psychiatrist at UCSF and author of the new book "The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest" about why sleep is important, the relationship of stress to sleep, and how to tune your body and environment to get a great night's sleep. Special Guest: Aric Prather.

Is self-control at age 4 a predictor of lifelong success? Rolf & Joe look at new studies that replicate and extend Mischel's marshmallow experiments, discussing why some kids can wait longer for a bigger treat and what the test itself means. Links: Watts, T. W., Duncan, G. J., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Del...

Our guests, Dr. Sheila Macrine and Dr. Jennifer Fugate, discuss the concept of "embodied cognition" and its implications for the classroom. They argue that traditional cognitive psychology has ignored the fact that the brain is situated in the body, and that learning happens most effectively if it is connected with our body and our environment, rather than learned abstractly.

Developmental psychologist Matthew Gingo joins to discuss his research on morality and deception. Why and under what circumstances do parents and their children lie to one another? We discuss his paper entitled " What they don't know won't hurt them: Parents' judgments about lying to their adolescents ", published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence (2019)

Joe and Rolf once again scry the future with bold and entirely accurate predictions about the year 2022

Joshua Miele is a blind scientist and inventor living in the Bay Area. Amongst his many initiatives is the Blind Arduino Project, where participants learn how to navigate a world of maker electronics that are really designed for the sighted. He talks to Joe and Rolf about his work to bring accessible and useful tools to the blind community. He teaches blind soldering classes, and he has worked to...

In Annie Murphy Paul's new book, " The Extended Mind ", the philosophical idea of our minds extending beyond the physical boundaries of the body are explored. Rolf and Joe talk to Annie about the implications of this idea, and how it might be used to improve the way we think in a number of contexts. Special Guest: Annie Murphy Paul.

The NIH Toolbox is the result of an ambitious project supported by the National Institutes of Health to develop a comprehensive, standardized, and highly accessible test battery to be used in research. Dr. Julie Hook is the Product Manager for the project and is in large part responsible for the development of the Toolkit. Rolf and Joe discuss with Julie a wide ranging set of topics related to the...

Bestselling author known for making complex topics accessible to readers, Tom Vanderbilt's recent book is Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Rather than buying into the idea that learning is for kids, Tom takes the "beginner's mind" to challenging new skills, such as singing, juggling, and jewelery making, where he starts at ground zero and works to achieve a level o...

Enough with 2020. Rolf and Joe present their predictions for what lies ahead in 2021.....

Joe and Rolf talk to Dr. Bernard Baars, a leader in the field of consciousness research. Dr. Baars has recently published "On Consciousness", which is a compendium on his work integrating research in psychology and neuroscience on what consciousness is and how it functions. T Special Guest: Bernard Baars.

David Rosen and Scott Miles of Secret Chord Laboratories (secretchordlaboratories.com) talk to Joe and Rolf about musical preference, the role of surprise in these preferences, what's going on in the brain, and how COVID is affecting the way we listen to music. Discussion paper: "A Statistical Analysis of the Relationship between Harmonic Surprise and Preference in Popular Music" (2017) https://ww...

An update on Episode 4, where we first discussed the phenomenon of the "Frey Effect" in which sounds are heard as a result of pulsed microwave radiation. The Frey Effect was proposed to be involved in attacks on the US embassy in Cuba. Could this also be going on in the US embassy in China? Rolf and Joe discuss further, and give a call out for any expertise that could be added.

In this half-hour episode, Rolf and Joe discuss research by Jennifer Mitchell and colleagues ("Dopamine, time perception, and future time perspective") showing that the drug tolcapone, which selectively increases dopamine in frontal cortical regions, has the effect of reducing the error in estimating how much time has passed. Individuals tend to systematicaly underestimate how much time has passed...

Since 1999, National Novel Writing Month has exploded in popularity, becoming one of the most creatively productive events in the world every November. Participants buckle down and write a 50,000-word novel in a month, many enjoying the social support from the NaNoWriMo community. Founder Chris Baty joins us to talk about what he's been up to lately, as well as share some thoughts gained from his...

30 min episode A connectome is a representation of every connection between neurons in the brain. Recent brain-slicing technology, in addition to image recognition tools, has begun to make this science-fiction idea become a reality. Rolf and Joe discuss the recent publication of the largest completed connectome to date, that of the fruit fly drosophilia. The database for the connectome is publicly...

Season 2 premiere! How do people behave in a pandemic? Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan talks about how we alter our behavior in the face of pathogens. A repertoire of responses (such as avoidance) referred to as the "behavioral immune system" is a way for humans to avoid pathogens BEFORE our biochemical immune system encounters them. A pandemic such as COVID-19 may trigger this behav...

Chris Mattman, Principal Data Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about bridging the gap between lab scientists and data scientists, his work with DARPA unearthing the dark web, machine learning in autonomous planetary rovers, and other cool stuff he's been doing. Chris Mattman's page at NASA More information about the Memex program at DARPA can be found here . Chris's forthcoming...

David Sobel , a developmental psychologist from Brown University, talks to us about the importance of play in learning. He has recently been collaborating with researchers around the country to investigate how children interact with exhibits in childrens' museums. One recent finding we discuss is that parent-child interaction styles can have a strong influence on what children learn. Research at t...

Guest Dr. Aaron Schurger talks to us about his research on the meaning of the "readiness potential", which has been referred to as "the brain signature of the will". Although this neural signal was already famous from research in the 1960s, it was Benjamin Libet's infamous experiments in the 1980s that proportedly showed that the readiness potential preceded an act of free will by a few hundred mi...

Guest Dr. Michael Trujillo of Karuna Labs talks to us about pain perception and recent research on the management of pain. We discuss a recent article (Hird et al.) exploring the degree to which expectation can alter the perception of pain, as well as Trujillo's work in using Virtual Reality in pain management. Boundary effects of expectation in human pain perception (2019) by Hird, Charalambous,...

Dr. Erick Gallun joins us today to talk about the latest in audiology research, and how it can be applied to help those with a range of hearing problems. His research has focused on rehabilitation with Veteran's Association (VA) patients. Rapid-response medical care and an understanding of how hearing is affected by brain damage are critical areas in need of research. Advances in portable computin...

Evidence has mounted that high-impact sports like boxing and football can lead to later cognitive problems, and there is increasing awareness that concussions should be taken seriously. So how does this all happen, and should you be worried? We take a look at some recent studies that shed some light on the topic. Articles: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2645104 https://www....

David Wulff, author of the comprehensive "Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary", talks with us today about some of the issues that psychologists grapple with in studying religion. How can a researcher take a fair and unbiased approach to a topic so fraught with issues of personal belief and faith? How important is belief anyway -- must one sacrifice the intellect to engage in religious...