The Neuromantics

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 6 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves Humans are apt to be taken in by hand-magic tricks because they bring to their observations an expectation of how hands work and what certain movements mean. If it looks as if a magician has passed an object from one hand to another, then surely that is what has happened. Corvids are not so easily fooled, in part because they do not expect...

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 5 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves It’s not unusual to have a “difficulty with names” as one gets older, but that difficulty typically worsens after the onset of a neurodegenerative disorder, such as dementia or stroke or MND. Of course the global impact of those diseases is to impair cognitive function generally. Even so, it seems to be true, as Carlo Semenza discusses in...

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 4 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves Reading is an advanced form of looking – and of looking at faces, in particular. That’s the fascinating story behind Evolution of Reading and Face Circuits during the First Three Years of Reading Acquisition , a paper published in NeuroImage in 2022 by Xiaoxia Fenge et al in which some interesting distinctions are made. The part of the bra...

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 3 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott Some people hear voices in their heads but are not suffering from a psychiatric disorder. The voices are “non clinical”, and the people who experience them “non-clinical voice hearers”. One question that arises is: do NCVHs also hear external speech in a different way; more distinctly, perhaps? According to experiments conducted by Ben Ald...

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 2 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves Have you ever tried to finish a tricky but familiar task – unlocking something, let us say – and discovered that, even though the key won’t turn in the lock, and there are other keys to be tried, you’re oddly compelled to carry on jiggling the one that doesn’t fit? If you have, then you have been demonstrating what psychologists call the E...

The Neuromantics – S3, Episode 1 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves South Sudan gained its independence from the north in 2011. A matter of months later, the retired human-rights researcher Elizabeth Hodgkin went to teach in a village in the mountains of Eastern Equatoria, close to the Ugandan border. Letters from Isohe (2022) memorably evokes the challenges of life in this beautiful but remote community....

The Neuromantics – S2, Ep 10 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott If you’re funny and you know it, you’re probably not funny. Equally unfunny are the theories of humour (such as: comedy makes us feel superior; or: it’s about “violations” of expectation), which don’t say much about varieties of taste and won’t help you win over a tough crowd. In “Wriggly, Squiffy, Lummox, and Boobs: What Makes Some Words Funn...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 9 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves This month, on the Neuromantics , we’re looking at stories about hormones, brains and sexual behaviour that run counter to expectations. Testosterone has a masculinising effect on the body in utero and in development, but it also has an effect on the brain, and in mammal brains it turns out that it’s only having that effect after it has in...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 8 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott How does a profound emotional experience in one generation affect the next? Is it handed down? Both the scientific paper and the short story under scrutiny in this month’s Neuromantics consider the ripple effect of trauma, and its observable consequences not just for survivors, but for those who come after them. Offspring of all the higher...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 7 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves Something happens when we go to the theatre, visit an art gallery, or hear music in the company of others, and it’s good for us, whatever our background, whatever the socio-economic indicators that mould our perceptions and expectations of art. That’s the contention – and, in part, the conclusion – of Daisy Fancourt and Alan Steptoe in the...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 6 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott An all-purpose definition of “metaphor” might be, as the OED suggests, a name or descriptive term given to an object to which it is not properly applicable – something described in terms of something else. Can such a transfer of meaning be more than a figure of speech? Hernan Pablo Casakin thinks so. In Tel Aviv, a group of first-year arch...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 5 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves The good news from neuroscientists in Australia ( Jiang, et al, 2020 ), as published in NeuroImage and reported in Psychology Today ( “How Some People Stay Sharp After 95” , May 6, 2020), is that very elderly people (90-100 yr-olds) exhibiting strong connectivity between the right and left frontal parietal lobes tend not to experience cogn...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 4 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves We’re on to the hard stuff now: sub-saharan baboons and grooming as a tool for promoting longevity, rogue males, currencies in friendship, feral children, niche succession, the mythical hinterland of the Peak District in weird fiction, and 1980s Variety Club Sunshine Coaches. One of the main findings of “ Social Bonds. social status and su...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 3 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves The human brain doesn’t work out of the box: it has to learn tasks; processing has to be developed. By “grey matter” we mean the 80 billion or so brain cells with which we’re born, but it’s the fatty white matter – or myelination  – growing along the cells’ axonal projections, connecting different parts of the brain, that make it work...

The Neuromantics, S2, Ep 2 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves How do birds know where things are? “The keys are where you last saw them”, we often say, meaning that, as mammals, we have to recall both an internalised map of location and the lost keys’ visual identity (their shape and colour) in order to find them again. And for a long time it was thought that birds did something similar, matching object cu...

The Neuromantics – S2, Episode 1 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves The verse produced in Baghdad by the Abbasid dynasty poets Abdullah Al-Mu’tazz (ninth century) and Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma’aari (tenth century) speaks to us across the years in vivid and at-once familiar translations by Abdullah Al-Udhari and George Wightman ( Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster , Penguin Classics, 1975). The poets’ subject-matt...

The Neuromantics – Episode 10 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves Laughter is a social lubricant, but to what end? What does it help us do, in a group, that strengthens that group’s social bonds? All is revealed in Episode 10 – the Season 1 finale – of The Neuromantics , your monthly meeting of scientific and literary minds. According to Alan Gray, Brian Parkinson and Robin Dunbar, in their 2015 paper on th...

The Neuromantics – Episode 9 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott How real are our conceptions? And if they’re real – if the mental world has substance of some kind – then what about imaginary companions and the voices we hear when we reason with ourselves? Are they disturbances or auditory perceptions? What role can they play in fostering self-reliance, and in child development and learning as a whole? Welc...

The Neuromantics – Episode 8 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott Pleasure seekers, you have arrived at your destination. In Episode 8 of The Neuromantics, your essential guide to neuroscience, art and literature, we look at the relationship between music and the body’s natural opioid system. What evidence does the pleasurable experience of listening to – and making – music provide for the existence of a neu...

The Neuromantics – Episode 7 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves We’re entering on sensitive ground in Episode 7 of the Neuromantics, our monthly podcast at the intersection of neuroscience and literature. In the 1990s, the “Memory Wars”, waged between different scientists, clinicians and therapists (and their patients), tried to settle a difficult question: is it possible for the memory of a traumatic even...

The Neuromantics – Episode 6 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves In Episode 6 of the Neuromantics, we conduct an allegro ma non troppo investigation of pitch, timbre and the high drama of embodied sound – what we feel when we sing, and why we sing at all. The two papers under vocal attack – but think Philly Soul as well as Kirsten Flagstad – are Gerald J. Balzano’s “What Are Musical Pitch and Timbre?” (1974...

The Neuromantics – Episode 5 Sophie Scott & Will Eaves Episode 5 of our neuroscience and literature podcast looks at emotions and the body with as much objectivity as it can muster. The two texts under discussion drill down into how (and where in the body) we feel things, what it is that we call emotion, and how feelings change or persist over time. Sarah Maguire‘s “The Hearing Cure” (a poem from...

The Neuromantics – Episode 4 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott Welcome to The Neuromantics, a monthly look-twice-both-ways at the crossroads of neuroscience and literature. In this fourth episode, Will Eaves and Professor Sophie Scott consider death and the different ways in which humans and primates respond to a loss of agency. Topics whispered and bewailed include ghostly voices in English poetry, the u...

The Neuromantics – Episode 3 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott Welcome to the third Neuromantics podcast, brought to you by Sophie Scott and Will Eaves. In this month’s edition, we’re looking at visual representation, mental imagery, and the relationship between sensory awareness in humans and the cultivated idea of an “inner world”. Topics covered, uncovered, and discovered, include the gulf between visu...

The Neuromantics – Episode 2 Will Eaves & Sophie Scott Welcome, listeners, new and nearly new, to The Neuromantics. Here‘s the second episode of what will be – we promise – a monthly podcast about literature, neuroscientific research and the surprising correspondences between the two in identifying and exploring fundamental traits of human communication. The idea: we give each other homework. I ha...