The Expanding Brain Podcast
by Akshata
An in-depth exploration into all things cultural and cognitive. Akshata and Christian review research about the mind, society, human experience, and any other interesting topics from an interdisciplinary perspective. Join us if you're looking for a bit of a deeper dive into the artificially constructed space between the hard and social sciences.
Episodes
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16. Choking - What Causes Failure in High Pressure Moments?
Sports history is full of generational choke-jobs: the Falcons against the Patriots during the Super Bowl; the Clippers against the Nuggets during the 2020 NBA playoffs; James Harden’s entire career. Choking isn't unique to the sports world either; test-takers, performing artists, quiz bowl…
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15. Are Androids People?
What about robots? AIs? How does science fiction construct these beings based on real social ideas of what it means to be a person, and how do real social systems affect the creation of these fictional beings? In today’s episode, Akshata and Christian take a break from discussing scientific…
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14. Where is the Consciousness of An Octopus?
What does it mean to have a single, unified consciousness? Is that the only way consciousness can work? In this episode, Akshata and Christian discuss a scientific paper that explores these questions through the lens of one of the most alien species on the planet: the octopus. The paper, titled...
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13. Entropic Consciousness: Psychedelics and Disorder in the Brain
Akshata and Christian discuss how psychedelic drugs can help us understand consciousness by analyzing a new theory of consciousness based on entropy. Are certain forms of consciousness “lower” or “higher” entropy? And what does that mean for the subjective experience of the conscious person? What...
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12. Unleashing Mathematical Creativity - Pt. 2
Akshata, Christian, and Ryan continue their discussion of mathematical creativity in Part 2 by getting deep into the four stage Gestalt model of creativity. They rank the four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification; and discuss how accurate this model is to real life...
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11. Unleashing Mathematical Creativity - Pt. 1
Akshata and Christian bring on a new guest Ryan to talk about the ever elusive idea of mathematical creativity. How do mathematicians experience creativity? How is creativity different while problem solving in math class versus while doing actual mathematical research? Does the process of...
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10. Sleep Deprivation in the Brain and in Society
Akshata and Christian are back, and this time they’re tackling one of the most expansive and interesting topics in cognitive science: sleep. Specifically, this episode explores sleep deprivation and what can happen to the brain when you don’t get enough sleep -from effecting integral phenomena…
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9. Music Therapy: Healing the Mind, Body, and Community
In this episode, Corinne Burch joins Akshata to talk about their experience as a music therapist. We begin with how music therapy benefits cognition, emotion, and social development, but we take a couple interesting detours. What actually counts as music and who gets to make that definition? Is...
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8. Montessori and Your Brain
In this episode Akshata and Christian, and their special guest Sadie discuss Montessori education and its effects on cognitive phenomena like creativity, executive function, and semantic memory. They delve into this somewhat niche teaching method that centers wholistic development for children…
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7. Does the DSM Need a Rethink? - Part 2
Akshata and Christian continue the conversation from last episode about the faults in the DSM and psychiatry brought up in Gary Greenberg’s “The Book of Woe.” In this second part, we talk about alternate ideas for diagnosis, we compare the DSM to the ICD (a manual developed by the ICD which is…
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6. Does the DSM Need a Rethink? - Part 1
Akshata and Christian explore the flaws in diagnostic psychiatry by discussing Gary Greenberg’s “The Book of Woe,” an expose and critique of the making of the DSM-5. In this first part of our conversation, we discuss the problems that underlie the classification human suffering through diagnosis,...
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5. The Cultural Red King Effect: Inequity Understood through Evolutionary Game Theory
Modern workplaces tend to be numerically skewed, often with an under-represented or marginalized minority group and a more influential majority group. Taking inspiration from evolutionary biology, we can model the workplace as a mutualism between the minority and majority, and we can then study…
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4. How Do We Define an "Individual?"
What makes something an "individual" in biology? It's easy to think of an organism or a single cell as an individual, we can even consider a gene as an individual. What about a virus? A bacterial colony? A symbiotic system? An ecosystem? Christian and Akshata discuss how a recent study uses...
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3. How does Power Affect the Brain?
Parth joins Akshata and Christian to discuss the concept of power in cognitive science. We talk about how power works in the brain (along with methodological issues we have about these studies), how power and leadership might have evolved in early human societies, and how we can apply what we've...
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2. GPT-3, A New Artificial Intelligence and its Implications
Christian and Akshata talk about GPT-3, a new iteration of a super powerful artificial intelligence. We chat about how computers and humans differ when it comes to poetry, math, learning, and even some scary implications of continuing to develop such advanced AI’s. Follow us on Twitter at...
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1. The Octopodcast - Earth's Most Intelligent Blobs
Christian and I (Akshata) talk about cephalopod evolution, how consciousness could have evolved, the role of language in thought, social intelligence, and a cool octopus proto-society. This is a deep dive on on Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book "Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of...
About this show
An in-depth exploration into all things cultural and cognitive. Akshata and Christian review research about the mind, society, human experience, and any other interesting topics from an interdisciplinary perspective. Join us if you're looking for a bit of a deeper dive into the artificially constructed space between the hard and social sciences.
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Akshata
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