Great CogSci podcast called @hiddenbrain

I'm so glad to report that there is a good cognitive science podcast in the U.S.: Hidden Brain, hosted by NPR reporter Shankar Vedantam and available on NPR and wherever podcasts can be found.

The Dec. 13, 2016 episode, We're More Alike Than Different, Thanks To Peer Pressure's Relentless Influence features an interview with Penn marketing professor Jonah Berger and combines two of my interests: cognitive science and advertising / marketing.

Berger says we tend to be pretty good at recognizing how social influence and peer pressure affect other people's choices. But we're not so good at recognizing those forces in our own decision-making.

It's a great episode, and if you like cognitive science, I highly recommend Hidden Brain.

This makes a great compliment to Australia's outstanding cognitive science podcast, All in the Mind, which I've written about before.

Why We Get Fat, with @GaryTaubes

The People's Pharmacy radio show is one of my favorites: Joe and Terry Graedon interview interesting scientists who speak intelligently about their topic (my recent listens included asthma and searching for health information online)

I was particularly impressed with their August interview with Gary Taubes, author of the 2011 book Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. I had read his 2002 New York Times magazine article "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" and it was great to hear him discuss the fat vs. carbohydrate controversy in terms of the current obesity epidemic.

Taubes is a great science writer who can explain complex topics simply and clearly. His New York Times magazine pieces on sugar (2011) and fat (2002) are relatively easy -- if very troubling -- reads.

I first became aware of The People's Pharmacy folks, Joe and Terry Graedon, at the 2011 Science Online Conference. I enjoy their 2011 book The People's Pharmacy Quick & Handy Home Remedies. I suspected I would like their radio show ... but I didn't realize I would come to include it in my "favorite science podcasts" category. Thanks, Science Online, for continuing to give the gift of science!

Brief Bibliography of Gary Taubes' Work

• Gary Taubes' Blog
• Good Calories, Bad Calories : Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
• Is Sugar Toxic?, New York Times magazine article, April 13, 2011.
• What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, New York Times magazine article, July 7, 2002.
• Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It, New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

David Eagleman on Time and Synesthesia

Burkhard Bilger had a great piece in the April 25, 2011 New Yorker entitled David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain. In it, Bilger discusses Eagleman's fascinating work trying to figure out how we think about time. Eagleman goes to a Zero Gravity "ride" to see if he can measure how our sense of time slows down when we are afraid (he can); he also goes to London to see if drummers' brains are more precise about time than "normal" brains (they are).

Our general perception of time seems to be influenced by emotion:

When something threatens your life, [the amygdala] seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

For more on this story, read the transcript of Bilger and Eagleman's chat session, Ask the Author Live: Burkhard Bilger on Time and the Brain. It's all fascinating!

Shortly after I read the New Yorker article, I was going through itunes, pruning some of my podcasts. I found a January 2010 episode of Australia's terrific All In The Mind in which Natasha Mitchell interviewed David Eagleman, in a show entitled: The afterlife, synesthesia and other tales of the senses. Eagleman talks very little about time, but quite a bit about synesthesia. If you want to know more about numbers having colors, or names having taste, give this show a listen.

More about Synesthesia

I was so excited about my possible synesthetic experience last week (aural synesthesia?) that I didn't explain what synesthesia actually is. It just so happened that on last week's episode of Australia's terrific radio program All in the Mind, host Natasha Mitchell interviewed neuroscientist David Eagleman. The two talked about his new novel Sum: 40 tales from the Afterlives, and Mitchell notes that Eagleman is "also a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk."

The interview is quite interesting -- for this topic, that's especially true of the second half, where Mitchell and Eagleman talk about his research into synesthesia and what we still don't know about the brain. Mitchell's blog post summarizes more of the interview and has been left open for comments from synesthetes and others.

For More Information

• Cytowic, Richard E. and David Eagleman. Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain on Synesthesia. MIT Press, 2009
• David Eagleman's lab
  
• Mitchell, Natasha, interview: David Eagleman: The afterlife, synesthesia and other tales of the senses. All in the Mind, June 20, 2009. mp3 ... print transcript available shortly.

Meet Paul Jones!

I heard a fascinating interview with Paul Jones, a clinical associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communications and a clinical associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science. Frank Stasio, interviewer for WUNC, also calls Jones a "public intellectual."
The interview is a like a whirlwind tour of the interwebs, as Jones talked about having worked with Tim Berners-Lee (the birth of the Internet), Larry Lessig (the birth of the Creative Commons), and Brewster Kahle (the birth of the online archive), as well as a bit about setting up ibiblio.org. Jones talked about Roger McGuinn and Youssou N'Dour (find out what they have in common!). He also read a lovely poem he wrote called Dividing Waters and talked about what poetry and coding have in common.

If you have 49 minutes and are interested in the interwebs, I highly recommend this interview.

For More Information

• Meet Paul Jones, The State of Things, North Carolina Public Radio WUNC, Feb. 16, 2008. Also on iTunes.
  
• IntraHealth OPEN and Youssou N’Dour promote Open Source for Health in Africa with music downloads. The Real Paul Jones, Jan. 24, 2009.
  

Future of Journalism? Newspapers?

I heard a neat interview on Radio Times today about the future of journalism & news.  It was surprisingly, and happily, upbeat (or maybe it was just my mood).  Listening to the conversation, I felt optimistic that while news gathering as we know it may change, but that reporting and writing will not change so much as to be unrecognizable.  I even felt optimistic that some kind of revenue stream could perhaps be worked out so that in-depth reporting (ie, what we think of now as print journalism) could continue.  Probably it won't look the same, but maybe it will continue to exist.  

One surprising bit of information that one of the guests mentioned (and I forget which; I was driving and didn't take notes) is that actual readership of content-formerly-known-as-print- journalism is UP, after a slide that started in the 1940s.

Here's what Radio Times says about the show:  "We talk about the challenges facing the profession of journalism and consumers of the news. How will we fund news-gathering operations, what will they look like how will we access the news and how we will ensure quality journalism? Our guests are ROBERT NILES of Online Journalism Review and TOM ROSENSTIEL of The Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism."

For More Information

• Radio Times, Challenges Facing the Profession of Journalism.  February 12, 2009.  Audio will be available shortly online and through iTunes.

Interruptions & Watching Television

Apparently, television commercials serve a useful purpose in the enjoyment of television shows. Future Tense's Jon Gordon interviewed Jeff Galak, a doctoral candidate at NYU's Stern School of Business last week regarding Galak's research suggesting that "commercial interruptions make TV shows more enjoyable."

Apparently it's not the commercials themselves that make us enjoy the shows we are watching. Instead, it's the forced break; we get habituated to what we are doing and thus enjoy it less over time. Since the commercials stop the show, when we return to the show, we enjoy it more because we've had a break. From the abstract:

"...[S]tudies demonstrate that, although people preferred to avoid commercial interruptions, these interruptions actually made programs more enjoyable (study 1), regardless of the quality of the commercial (study 2), even when controlling for the mere presence of the ads (study 3), and regardless of the nature of the interruption (study 4)."

The article will be published August.

For More Information

• Gordon, Jon. Study: Interruptions make TV shows more enjoyable. Future Tense, Jan. 20, 2009.
  
• Nelson, Leif D., Tom Meyvis, and Jeff Galak (2009), “Enhancing the Television Viewing Experience through Commercial Interruptions,” in Press at the Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (August). [Paper; subscription required or check @ your library]

Audiology Lectures @ California's Commonwealth Club

I've been listening to some terrific audiology lectures thanks to the Commonwealth Club of California, "the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum." In May 2008, they offered a "Hearing Miniseries," in which three hearing specialists spoke for about an hour each on various aspects of hearing and hearing-related issues.

1. "How Hearing and the Brain Changes with Age," by Robert W. Sweetow, PhD, Director of Audiology at the UCSF Medical Center on May 15, 2008. Sweetow explains how hearing works, and notes that some age-related hearing problems are due to deterioration of the hearing systems in the ear. Other issues, he says, are more brain-related, because the brain is slower to process information as we age, and this includes processing sound and turning it into something meaningful. You can listen to the audio on the Commonwealth Club web site in real audio, purchase a CD of the lecture ($15), or look for it in iTunes (mp3). His part starts about 5 minutes into the ~66 minute lecture.

#2: "Cochlear Implants: Where Are we in 2008," by Lawrence Lustig, M.D., Division Chief of Otology, Nuerotology and Skull Base Surgery, UCSF, on May 22, 2008. Lustig explains what cochlear implants are and how they work, providing some history and some ideas of the future of cochlear implants. He brought two patients with him who talk briefly about what it was like to get cochlear implants and what effect the implants had on their hearing. You can listen to the audio on the Commonwealth Club web site in real audio, purchase a CD of the lecture ($15), or look for it in iTunes (mp3). His part starts about 6 minutes into the ~65 minute lecture.

#3: "The Future of Hearing: A Sound Investment," by Rodney Perkins M.D., Founder and Chairman of Sound ID, on May 28, 2008. Perkins talked about "hearing devices" (he abhors the term "hearing aids") in general, and then about two devices that his companies are working on. I liked his speaking style -- and I really liked his discussion of why dogs (and, I would argue, cats) perk their ears in different directions (to pinpoint the location of sound). You can listen to the audio on the Commonwealth Club via iTunes or via mp3. His part starts 4 minutes into the ~59 minute lecture.

I'd recommend these lectures to people who are personally interested in hearing -- either because they or someone they know is suffering from hearing loss, or because they are studying hearing / audiology and want some basic information presented in an engaging way. Of course, they're also very helpful for librarians supporting hearing professionals of all stripes.

Psychology Podcasts @ UConn

UConn psychology professor Dr. David B. Miller is recording small group discussions which enhance his two large psychology classes. One podcast is called iCube ("Issues In Intro"), about which Miller says:

[These] are informal discussions with students on course material following each week's General Psychology lectures. Students who participate have the opportunity to ask questions for clarification, as well as expand on course material and discuss issues not necessarily covered in class.

He supports the General Psychology class with two other audio sessions, called precasts ("short, enhanced podcasts previewing material before each lecture") and postcasts ("re-explanations of concepts that might be important and/or detailed and, therefore, justify repeating" which are created following some, but not all, lectures).

I am a regular listener to both, and find them very useful. First, the explanation of psychology topics is fun because of my interest in cognitive science. Second, the podcasts are a fascinating insight into how one of "my" professors works with his students in my liaison department. Finally, they are a great example of how all educators can use new technology to enhance our teaching.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sit in on his recording session and it was a delight. There were about 20 students sitting around two tables, and virtually all of them were engaged with the conversation. I felt that I could see them learning, and that was a wonderful sight. The podcasts are a great, tech-oriented but not tech-dominated, way for Miller to provide additional information to students in his large introductory class. The beauty of them, it seems to me, is that they are helpful not only to the students who are able to attend the recording session, but also that they are available to other students as a podcast to listen to at their convenience, and as often as they like.

I liked the idea of podcasts-supporting-classes very much in theory, and I was even more impressed with the idea after having seen them in action. I am inspired to try to apply this to my own classes; instead of running exclusively text-based chat "office hours" for my GSLIS classes, I think I'll try Skype sessions next semester. Students who want to do text-based chat can do that, but students who learn more from hearing could benefit too.

But back to Miller: he has discussed his podcasts at various conferences and print publications; check out his 2006 article Podcasting at the University of Connecticut: Enhancing the Educational Experience in the October 16, 2006 issue of Campus Technology. Oh, and he's written his own theme song, PsychoBabble, which he discusses in a standalone podcast. For real!

For More Information

• Miller, David. iCube. (on the UConn web site, and available on iTunes) ... note that he's got a shout-out to me in the Oct. 23 episode ...
  
• Miller, David. "Writing Center: Help for Students, and Beyond," (mp3) interview with Tom Deans, Associate Professor of English and Director and director of the University of Connecticut Writing Center.
  
• Miller, David. Podcasting at the University of Connecticut: Enhancing the Educational Experience. Campus Technology, October 16, 2006.
• 2007 Campus Technology Innovators: Podcasting. August 1, 2007.
• Timmer, John.Moving Beyond Podcasts: Multimedia and the Academic Experience. ars technica, April 23, 2007.
  

Favorite Podcasts

I've had two conversations recently in which I was discussing favorite science podcasts. Since this blog serves as a long-term memory aid, I'm listing, in alphabetical order, some of the sci-tech podcasts I like right now. (read about earlier favorites)

• All in the Mind Terrific 30-minute discussion of all things psychology from Australia's ABC Radio National. Host and science journalist Natasha Mitchell is very knowledgeable and has interviewed folks like Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, and others in psychology, neuroscience, and even philosophy. I've blogged about many episodes. (note: their web site was down as I wrote this, but it should be back soon)
  
• Brain Science Podcast Host Ginger Campbell (an ER "doc" in Alabama) conducts terrific interviews and book talks about many cognitive science topics. She's interviewed Christof Koch, linguist Alice Gaby, and Brain Rules author John Medina. She asks good, knowledgeable questions and her conversations have inspired me to buy many books for myself and for my library. You can follow Ginger on Twitter, and read what I've blogged about prior Brain Science podcasts.
  
• Free Library of Philadelphia "Author Event" lectures, feature many types of authors including several scientists. I just listened to physicist Paul Davies' talk entitled Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life and was riveted by Simon Winchester talking about The Man Who Loved China: Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece. There are also lectures by Steven Pinker on his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Eric Kandel talking about In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. Looks like mathematician and physicist Brian Greene will be speaking this fall! These hour-long talks usually contain a 30-minute lecture then ~30 minutes of Q&A with the audience.
  
• Future Tense 3-4 minute radio program subtitled "Public radio's daily journal of the digital age." Host (and Twitterer) Jon Gordon covers many aspects of technology, such as podcasting (not mainstream yet, apparently), PowerPoint, as well as many Mac and PC issues. I've blogged many Future Tense episodes.
  
• GSLIScast Audio recordings from many speaker presentations at Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science. They usually run 60-90 minutes.
• Radio Times with WHYY's Marty Moss-Coane. The majority of these 50-minute podcast are NOT about science, but the ones that are are terrific (and the others are, too). Moss-Coane has interviewed Avery Gilbert, psychologist and smell expert; Gary Marcus, Hampshire alum and director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center; and Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. Unfortunately, the mp3 links have a short shelf-live at WHYY's site, so it's best to subscribe to the show via iTunes.
  
• SirsiDynix Institute Free, hour-long workshops with library leaders about various aspects of library science, including David Lee King's primer on video on the web and the awesome Maximizing the Power of the Web: Pew Internet & American Life Project's 2007 Findings with Lee Rainie.
  
• TED Talks 20-minute talks by prominent thinkers in many disciplines, including science, technology, arts, and more. Topics include Sugata Mitra showing how kids teach themselves; Patricia Burchat shedding light on dark matter; and Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web. I've blogged about several TED Talks.
  
• TVBarn Not science-related, but thoughtful conversations about TV between (Twitterer) Aaron Barnhart and a few radio talk show hosts across the country. My favorites are when he speaks with Paul Harris. They are usually 5-15 minutes but sometimes last longer.

Please add your favorite science podcast(s) in the comments!

Michael Gazzaniga Now

I've just seen / heard about a couple of interviews with Michael Gazzaniga, the father of cognitive neuroscience:

He was on the Australian radio show All in the Mind in June, and they introduce him as follows:

One of the big names of the brain is Michael Gazzaniga, whose career was forged in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry. His striking experiments continue to uncover the differences between your left and right hemispheres. Today he's on the US President's Bioethics Council, heads up a major project on neuroscience and the law, and is a prolific writer of popular neuroscience. He joins Natasha Mitchell to reflect on the brain's left and right, and the mysterious nature of free will.

He was in Australia for the International Human Brain Mapping Conference, and Natasha Mitchell's 30-minute interview covered split brains, the discovery of "blind sight," and free will. You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript; you can also subscribe to All in the Mind via iTunes.

Ross Buck, professor in the University of Connecticut's department of Communication, points me to an upcoming interview in Seed magazine. While the published interview won't appear until the August issue of Seed, you can read the full transcript of the conversation between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga. You can also watch a video of the interview at the Seed Salon. About the interview and video, they say:

Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Note that UConn has several of Gazzaniga's books, and I will shortly order his latest, Human : The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

For More Information

• Gazzaniga, Human : The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. New York : Ecco Press, 2008.
• Interview: All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, June 21, 2008.
• Interview: Seed, August 2008. Interview transcript online July 1, 2008.
  

Giving Good Airport

While on my flight home from NASIG last week, I used my iPod Touch to watch a New Yorker conference session called Deconstructing the Airport. Paco Underhill, founder of market research and consulting company Envirosell, talks about how to remake air travel for the twenty-first century. Underhill has written books on the Science of Shopping and the Call of the Mall (subtitled "the geography of shopping"), and now turns his attention to airports. If I may translate what he does into library / IT language, he talks about usability / user interaction assessments of people as they use airports.

For instance, he says that people's perception of time spent waiting while in a security or check-in line is usually longer than the reality -- up to 50%, in fact! Underhill suggests that the entire airport needs to be completely redone, in part for functionality, and in part to reduce our perception of this long wait time. He gives many examples of functionality, but here are two I liked: the "body bubble" is different in airports than it is in other areas of our lives -- we have only one hand free (if that) and we are pulling / carrying a suitcase, and possibly also a backpack. So our peripersonal space is totally different - but that is not taken into consideration when designing the airport. Another ha! moment: "the filthiest place in the first world is the bathroom in the economy section of an airplane."

As I watched all this, I started thinking that there are a lot of similarities between how Underhill describes the problems with airports and the difficulties some of our patrons face in libraries.

Underhill says: "... we live in a world that is owned by men, designed by men, managed by men, and yet we expect women to participate in it." Amen, brother! (but I digress) Except ... I'm not really digressing. What if we modify that phrase like this:

"... we create a library that is owned by librarians, designed by librarians, managed by librarians, and yet we expect novice library patrons to participate in it." (changed words italicized) It's a slight modification, but all of a sudden some of us might have a better understanding of what the library is like for our patrons. D'oh!

Underhill gives some great ideas on how airports could be "reinvented:"

• Free WiFi everywhere, among other suggestions to improve incessant travel waiting. again I say, Amen, brother! (and also: thank you! to my local airport, BDL, which does offer free WiFi)
• Offer different lines at security, for families, registered travelers, etc.
• Offer healthy food choices! halal, vegetarian ...
• Shopping (and other services) that reflect a one-handed customer. He suggests offering a wand-style checkout like the Exxon/Mobil Speedpass to reduce physical difficulties paying for items in an airport.
  
• Rocking chairs like at the Charlotte airport, and other kinds of movable seating (his demonstration of the rocking movement is charming).
  

Sounds like it could be called Airport 2.0. Let's hope airports and libraries can both redesign themselves (quickly) to be usable, and functional for real users.

For More Information

• Underhill, Paco. Deconstructing the Airport "Stories from the Near Future," the New Yorker Conference, May 23, 2008. Available through iTunes.
  
• Also possibly of interest: Airport Wireless Internet Access Guide, which lists airports which offer free WiFi. Yay!
  

Using Social Software in Libraries

Just heard a great talk by Meredith Farkas called Building Academic Library 2.0. Meredith did a terrific job of talking about technology in a way that tech librarians would appreciate and that non-techies would understand. The talk was presented to academic librarians, but her tech explanations are also useful to anyone interested in social software like blogs, wikis, flickr, and podcasts to interact with patrons or students.

Two non-tech recommendations that I especially liked:

• Let go of "the culture of perfect" -- if we wait for our web site, chat software, OPAC to be the elusive perfect, it'll never happen and we'll get left behind. (the "culture of perfect" is Meredith's idea, the "we’ll be left behind" is mine).
• Nurture talent. Meredith mentions a Library Journal Mover & Shaker who recently left academia; Meredith exhorted the audience to support innovators, and find ways of keeping people who do cool stuff. I agree with that, and I raise her one: we librarians who are dong cool stuff should active support each other. I think we do that already, but I want to keep it more of a priority for myself to support my friends and colleagues who are fighting the good fight.
  

(Meredith's talk starts around minute 13)

If you want to know more about using social software in libraries, in the classroom, or anywhere else, this is a good talk, and Meredith also has a book on the topic. Yay!

For More Information

• Farkas, Meredith. Building Academic Library 2.0. Keynote Speaker @ Conference sponsored by the Librarians Association of the University of California, Berkeley Division. November 2, 2007. Link @ Berkeley includes webcast, streaming podcast, and downloading podcast. See also Meredith's blog post about her presentation: Building Academic Library 2.0 video, Nov. 26, 2007.
  
• Farkas, Meredith. Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication, and Community Online. InfoToday, 2007, and her companion web site: sociallibraries.com
  

Finding CogSci Podcasts

In case you're wondering ... here are some ways to find nifty cognitive science & other podcasts.

Here's a Google search trick I use to find podcasts of interviews with folks whom I'd like to hear: inurl:podcast + "name of person" (in quotes). The command inurl:podcast means that the word "podcast" has to be in the URL, which gives you a good chance that the link will actually lead to a podcast. This does result in some false positives, but it's a pretty reliable search.

A search for this: inurl:podcast "david sloan wilson" yields 6 results, including an interview with Wilson on the site of publisher's of his recent book.

A search for this inurl:podcast "positive psychology" brings up over 200 results, many of which are interviews with scholars working with positive psychology.

Lists of psychology & cogsci podcasts:

• The British Psychological Society has a Research Digest Blog with some nifty posts. One feature of this blog is a section called "Elsewhere (for when you've had enough of journal articles" (heh) which lists some mainstream (frequently the Manchester Guardian) coverage of psychology & cognitive science, including podcasts.
  
• The BPS also has a blog post called Psychology Podcasts: a Clickable List which is a nice list of podcasts about psychology. Christian Jarrett maintains the list and is happy to post new links to the site.
• This Week in Science features some cognitive science / cognitive psychology; see their list of posts in cognitive science.
• University of California San Diego faculty member Rafael Nunez has posted entire 80-minute lectures for his Introduction to Cognitive Sci class.
  

Regular readers of the CogSci Librarian will know that these are among my favorites:

• Ginger Campbell at the Brain Science Podcast covers lots of interesting cognitive science topics, including consciousness, memory, body maps, and more.
• Natasha Mitchell's All in the Mind podcast covers all kinds of topics, such as intuition, music, and vision, as well as interviews with Daniel Dennett & Steven Pinker.
  
• The New York Times "Science Times" podcast often features psych / neuroscience stuff. See New York Times & scroll down to Science Times, or subscribe in iTunes.

Blogged with Flock

Sleep Now

["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news]

Last week, the New York Times had several articles on sleep. You can see the list at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock blog: Sleeping with the New York Times. David Corcoran of the New York Times also talked about sleep in last week's podcast (scroll down to Science Times, or subscribe in iTunes).

And on Friday, Oct. 26, WHYY's Radio Times did an hour-long show on sleep. Can't bookmark the broadcast notes, so they are here:
"10/26/2007 ... Hour 2
The mystery of sleep. We spend one-third of our lives sleeping yet we still don't know why we sleep? Fortunately sleep researchers are working day and night to gain insight into what sleep does for us. Today we'll hear the latest on what we know about sleep with AMITA SEGHAL, Professor of Neuro-science at the University of Pennsylvania, and JEFFREY ELLENBOGEN, Director of the Sleep Medicine Program at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. MP3 (available for a limited time)"

Finally, back in May, WNYC's Radio Lab covered sleep: "Every creature does it - from giant hump back whales all the way down to fruit flies - and yet science still can't answer the basic questions: Why do we sleep? What is it for? We'll eavesdrop on the uneasy dreams of rats in search of answers." AND, learn how dolphins can sleep and breathe at the same time. See show notes & links to the audio.

Great listening in the car this week! Sure makes me sleepy ...

Christof Koch Now

["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news]

Ginger Campbell over at the Brain Science Podcast recently interviewed Christof Koch. It’s a fascinating discussion -- almost a lecture by Koch -- on the nature of consciousness. Koch kept things (relatively) simple and it was pretty easy to follow for the non-philosopher, non-neuroscientist, non-physicist. He was delightfully gracious, even as he knocked philosophers here & there.

Koch and Susan Greenfield had an interesting point/ counterpoint about where the neural correlates of consciousness are in the October 2007 Scientific American: very short version; full version your library. :-)

Another podcast ... (tho' I haven't listened to these yet)
* 'Consciousness, Free Will, and God': "The nature of consciousness in humans and animals and its effect on how we view religion, science and philosophy will be tackled during three lectures at Vanderbilt University by prominent researcher Christof Koch." This page offers links to the three lectures in mp3; you can also get them via iTunes.

Podcast / Interviews I've Enjoyed

I've heard some very interesting podcasts / interviews lately & instead of blogging about each one, I thought I'd just list them with a very brief note about what was relevant for cog sci.

• WNYC's Radio Lab is a fun 50-minute show covering various aspects of science very loosely defined. I just listened to the show on Time from 2005, and it was a fascinating look into various aspects of people's perception of time. Hosts Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich speak with Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Jay Griffith, and physicist Brian Greene.


• ETA I found it ... There was a great interview recently on WHYY's Radio Times, with Marty Moss-Coane, about bonobos. "How do baboons relate to each other and understand their place in the world and what can we learn from them about human behavior? Penn researchers Dorothy Cheney and ROBERT SEYFARTH, who joins us in the studio today, have been studying baboons and monkeys in their natural habitat for over 20 years. Their work is documented in a new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Radio Times, June 7, 2007. Archive no longer available.


• Dr. Ginger Campbell, of the the Brain Science Podcast, recently interviewed Elkhonon Goldberg, author of The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford, 2001). Interesting discussion of the pre-frontal lobes, and how they relate to the other structures of the brain. Campbell also discuss some ideas about why the left and right sides of the brain differ, as well as several important ways in which the cortex, and especially the pre-frontal lobes differ from some of the older parts of the brain.
  


• The SETI Institute has a terrific radio show called Are We Alone; the SETI's mission is "to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe." They seem to like cognitive science, at least enough to have had a recent episode on consciousness called That Thinking Feeling (mp3). Show hosts Seth and Molly interviewed a bevy (?) of neuro* & *philo* folks, including Marvin Minsky, author of The Emotion Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2007); Nicholas Strausfeld, Neurobiologist at the University of Arizona at Tucson, who talks about how smart cockroaches are, and how he knows; and Susan Clancy, author of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Harvard, 2005) (because of "sleep paralysis"?!



• ETA ... Australia's All In The Mind offers another great episode, this time entitled Nature? Nurture? What makes us human? It's a podcast of the start of the 2007 Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture series, and it features bits of Matt Ridley's lecture, in which he speaks about his book Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (HarperCollins, 2003). Following his lecture, Natasha Mitchell speaks with Professor Robert Williamson A.O. and Rhonda Galbally A.O, for a fascinating discussion of the "nature vs. nurture" debate. note to former reference students: Dunedin features prominently. A print transcript of Ridley's lecture is available, as is a podcast, in addition to the All in the Mind podcast.

All shows are highly recommended!

My Favorite Diphthong, or, The Maple Leafs

This turned out to be Linguistics Week in the CogSciLibrarian's commute.

First up, Seth Lerer on WHYY's Radio Times (May 11, 2007; listen via RealAudio or find on iTunes). Lerer talked about his new book Inventing English: A Portable History of The Language.

Lerer read part of the first poem written in English somewhere in the 6th century. He talked about the evolution of language from that poem through Old English, Middle English, the Great Vowel Shift, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Twain, and up to & including email & rap. I felt like I was sitting in Mark Feinstein's History of Language class again!

Things I liked from his talk:
* Shakespeare invented ~6,000 words & phrases, including assassination (which comes from "hashish"!) and "be all and end all." (list from wikipedia)
* Lerer's favorite diphthong is "i," "might," "thine," which to my untrained ear, sounds like oeil in French, which he suggests is the origin of "pirate English." Ahoy Matey!
* Johnson's definition of "oats:" a food given to horses in England and humans in Scotland.
* Mark Twain first fictionalized the term "dude" and "hello" (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), and the term became popular in the 1880s.
* He's a great speaker who's incredibly enthusiastic about his topic.

More about Professor Lerer. Read his new book, OR borrow his "Teaching Company" lectures on the History of the English Language from the library.


And then I listened to a March 2006 lecture by Steven Pinker on CBC's Big Ideas lecture series (mp3 available at amigofish). He talked about regular & irregular verbs and nouns, and hypothesized about how and where such grammatical rules are stored in the brain.

I most liked hearing about the irregular forms of verbs and nouns. For instance, the 10 most popular verbs (number of occurrences in a million words of speech) in English are all irregular, such as be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get. There is a 788-way tie for those words that are used only once in a million words -- and Pinker shows that the first 10 alphabetically are regular & can be "pasted" by adding -ed at the end of the verb. These include abhor, abrogate, acclimatize, and adulturate.

I also liked hearing about making compound nouns plural, including that the hockey team is called the Maple Leafs rather than the Maple Leaves and a group of more than one lowlife is called lowlifes. "It happens whenever ... the meaning of the noun ... is not simply the meaning of the little noun inside it" -- compare "workman" with "still life" to see the difference here.

Read a review of Pinker's book Loading "Words and Rules : the Ingredients of Language" in the article Washington Sleeped Herefrom the November 29, 1999 New York Times.


I'm not a linguist, and I know some of this is controversial, but I enjoy thinking about words and how they work. If you do, check out the podcasts or some of the books cited here.

The (MD) Bell Curve

I'm listening to physician and writer Atul Gawande read from his book Better: A Surgeon's Note on Performance," on APM's show Word For Word (audio file).

In the book, Gawande investigates what separates good doctors and great ones, by looking at success rates for various conditions. He talks about two hospitals that treat cystic fibrosis -- one in which the success rates are about average (Cincinnati Children's Hospital, with an average CF life expectancy of just over 30) and another in which the results are way above average (the Minnesota Cystic Fibrosis Center, at Fairview-University Children's Hospital, in Minneapolis, where CF patients typically live to over 40 years old).

He suggests the difference is due to above-and-beyond diligence on the part of doctors:
"[Center director, pediatrician Warren Warwick] believed that excellence came from seeing, on a daily basis, the difference between being 99.5-per-cent successful and being 99.95-per-cent successful. Many activities are like that, of course: catching fly balls, manufacturing microchips, delivering overnight packages. Medicine's only distinction is that lives are lost in those slim margins."

Gawande adds: "Warwick's combination of focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness is what makes him extraordinary." (both quotes from the New Yorker article cited below)

Fascinating example of extraordinary work. Kind of inspiring -- how can we apply this to our own (less life-threatening but still important) work?

Citations
Read the CF story in the New Yorker, "THE BELL CURVE; What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?", December 6, 2004 pp. 82+. Available in LexisNexis and Academic Search Premier and other library databases.

Gawande was also on WHYY's Radio Times on May 15, 2007.

Brain Science Podcast

I've just discovered a new podcast about cognitive science called the Brain Science Podcast, created by an emergency physician, Dr. Ginger Campbell.

The most recent episode is about Emotion; Campbell reviews the 2001 book Emotion : The Science of Sentiment, by British philosopher Dylan Evans.

Here are the show notes, which is a good summary of what Campbell discussed:

"This episode is a short introduction to the idea that our emotions are an essential part of our intelligence.

* We discuss the Basic Emotions based on the work of anthropologist Paul Eckman.
* We learn about culturally learned emotions such as “being a wild pig,” which is observed among the Gurumba people of New Guinea
* Paul Griffiths introduced the idea of “higher cognitive emotions”
* Emotions seem to exist on a continuum from the highly innate basic emotions to the culturally specific emotions
* The work of Joseph Ledoux and Antonio Damasio reveal that our emotions are an important element of normal intelligence
* We consider how fear actually follows two pathways in the brain
* We consider the role of the limbic system including the amygdala
* We consider the relationship between emotions and mood
* We consider how mood effects memory and decision making
o This includes Robert Zajonc’s discovery of the “mere exposure” effect
* We briefly consider the question of whether computers could ever display emotions"

Other topics have included neuroplasticity (in which Campbell covered Sharon Begley's book Train your mind, change your brain : how a new science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves and consciousness).

Highly recommended.