Brains for Dinner: Conversations Between Neuroscientists who Happen to be Married

Friends and family, real and virtual, we’re back after too long of a delay with our next episode of Brains for Dinner ! We hope it was worth the wait. We start this episode by sharing some of the big things that have been keeping us busy these past two months, including a series of milestones for Andrea: turning 50, passing his naturalization test, and giving a kick-ass talk (as part of his promot...

As far as Andrea and I are aware, no one really knows why humans spend 20-25% of our time asleep producing vivid, emotional, story-like hallucinations—our brains in states that mimic waking, while our bodies remain largely paralyzed and unable to act out these hallucinations. But philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists alike have all thrown their hats into the ring when trying to underst...

B4D is back with a bang after a brief hiatus! We hope it was worth the wait :) Though I rarely play favorites, this is definitely one of my favorite episodes so far… In it, Andrea and I talk about our personal experiences with what we call in the field phenomenological differences, or differences in peoples subjective ways people think. Want to figure out how you think? Here’s a link to the questi...

I think it’s fair to say that Episode 5 of B4D reaches new highs and lows of sophistication (and that’s saying something). From lessons in how to interpret statistics, to laughing fits spawned by burping dogs, this hour of content contains something for everyone. Our musings were sparked by an article Andrea read about how reviews of books, movies, and the like have increasingly disappeared from n...

Yesterday I was watching a talk about procrastination for book research (I wasn’t procrastinating, I swear). When the cameraperson panned the audience, I saw much younger versions of Andrea and I, and it gave me all the feels. The talk was over a decade ago, and our lives were very different then—but seeing us there, taking it all in, brought me right back into the moment. I could feel the excitem...

I have good news and bad news and in our family we always do the bad new first so here goes… Brains for Dinner Episode 3 does not come with a side order of dancing birds or babies! (never fear, you can always return to Episode 2 for this!) AND we went nearly 7 minutes over time. EEK! The good news is that this episode is centered on a topic that is near and dear to my heart, language! I was thrill...

This was an extremely fun episode to record—arguably too fun because we were SO LOUD that Chantel had to learn how to use sound editing software to remove some of the microphone artifacts. Ah well, you live and you learn! We sincerely hope that the fun is contagious. Whether you’d like to add a drinking game (might I suggest guessing whether Chantel says something is “exciting” or Andrea says it’s...

We’re so excited to share the first episode of Brains for Dinner (BFD), where we talk about real life and our shared love of brains. This episode is centered on metacognition. Like many of the topics Andrea and I chat about, metacognition is a word that means different things to different people. In this dinner date, Andrea explains the difference between “thinking about thinking” and the kinds of...