Shahin Zagros

The Abstract

Science EN ↓ 4 episodes

The Abstract: Neuroscience Unlocked What makes us human? It all comes back to the three-pound universe between your ears. Join neuroscientist and science writer Dr. Shahin Zagros as he sits down with the world’s sharpest minds in brain research to unpack the research that’s rewriting what we know about the mind. Every episode takes a brand-new, high-impact paper and distills it into four crystal-clear parts: Objective: what were they actually trying to find out? Methods: how did they look inside the black box? Results: what did they discover? Significance: why does this change everything? From...

Author

Shahin Zagros

Episodes

The brain's response-conflict system is more complicated than we thought 10.01.2026 1:14:28

What if the brain’s famous “error detection” signature—midfrontal theta—wasn’t just one signal, but an entire set of individual rhythms? In this episode of The Abstract , I pull renegade neuroscientist, Dr. Mike X Cohen, back into the world of academia to unpack his 2020 bombshell paper. Using ultra-dense simultaneous MEG+EEG and clever generalized eigendecomposition, his work revealed 3–11 distin...

Beyond the seizure epicentre: a network approach to temporal lobe epilepsy 15.12.2025 44:51

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sara Larivière, Assistant Professor at the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiobiology at Université de Sherbrooke. She is at the head of the SLIC (Sherbrooke Laboratory for Integrative Connectomics), holding a Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Epilepsy. Dr. Larivière and I are friends and colleagues, having received our doctorate training at the same l...

You don't need to be a neuroscientist to have common sense. 30.11.2025 1:48

I'm Shahin Zagros, cognitive neuroscientist and founder of ZAGROSCIENCE. I take brain research very seriously, which is why I find a lot of what passes for neuroscience online lacking in substance. With my podcast, The Abstract, I bring you the latest and most compelling work in the field by interviewing the women and men who are driving it forward. Don't settle for fluff or sensationalization - g...

Brain function: the interplay between local specialization and global integration 24.11.2025 42:18

In this inaugural episode, I speak with one of the world’s foremost experts in neuroimaging and brain connectomics, Dr Boris Bernhard, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroinformatics. Dr Bernhardt is the Principal Investigator at the Multimodal Imaging and Connectome Analysis (MICA) Lab situated at the McConnell Brain Imaging Cen...