Big Picture Science for Oct. 25th, 2021 - Skeptic Check: Brain Gain

Big Picture Science - Skeptic Check: Brain Gain

Looking to boost your brainpower? Luckily, there are products promising to help. Smart drugs, neurofeedback exercises, and brain-training video games all promise to improve your gray matter’s performance. But it’s uncertain whether these products really work. Regulatory agencies have come down har
 on some popular brain training companies for false advertising. But other brain games have shown benefits in clinical trials. And could we skip the brain workout altogether and pop a genius pill instead?

In our regular look at critical thinking, we separate the pseudo from the science of commercial cognitive enhancement techniques.

Guests:

• Caroline Williams – Science journalist and author of “My Plastic Brain: One Woman’s Yearlong Journey to Discover If Science Can Improve Her Mind”
• Adam Gazzaley – Neuroscientist, University of California, San Francisco, and the executive director of Neuroscape.  His book is “The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High Tech World.”
• Amy Arnsten – Professor of neuroscience and psychology at Yale Medical School
• Kevin Roose – Journalist for the New York Times.
• Leonard Mlodinow – Physicist and author of “Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change”

This repeat podcast originally aired on August 6, 2018

Download podcast at - http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/skeptic-check-brain-gain

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.

Big Picture Science for Oct. 18th, 2021 - Radical Cosmology

 

Big Picture Science - Radical Cosmology

(Repeat) 400 years ago, some ideas about the cosmos were too scandalous to mention. When the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno suggested that planets existed outside our Solar System, the Catholic Inquisition had him arrested, jailed, and burned at the stake for heresy.

Today, we have evidence of thousands of planets orbiting other stars. Our discovery of extrasolar planets has dramatically changed ideas about the possibility for life elsewhere in the universe.

Modern theories about the existence of the ghostly particles called neutrinos or of collapsed stars with unfathomable gravity (black holes), while similarly incendiary, didn’t prompt arrest, of course. Neutrinos and black holes were arresting ideas because they came decades before we had the means to prove their existence.

Hear about scientific ideas that came before their time and why extrasolar planets, neutrinos, and black holes are now found on the frontiers of astronomical research.

Guests:

• Alberto Martínez – Professor of history, University of Texas, Austin, and author of Burned Alive: Giordano Bruno, Galileo & the Inquisition
• Anne Schukraft – Associate scientist, Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory
• Ephraim Fischbach – Professor of physics and astronomy, Perdue University
• Chris Impey – Professor of astronomy, University of Arizona, and author of Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes

This repeat podcast originally aired on February 18, 2019

Download podcast at - http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/radical-cosmology

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.

Big Picture Science for Oct. 11th, 2021 - Fuhgeddaboudit

Big Picture Science - Fuhgeddaboudit

A thousand years ago, most people didn’t own a single book. The only way to access knowledge was to consult their memory.

But technology – from paper to hard drives – has permitted us to free our brains from remembering countless facts. Alphabetization and the simple filing cabinet have helped to systematize and save information we might need someday.

But now that we can Google just about any subject, have we lost the ability to memorize information? Does this make our brains better or worse?

Guests:

• Judith Flanders – Historian and author, most recently of A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
• Craig Robertson – Professor of Media Studies, Northeastern University and author of The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information
• David Eagleman – Neuroscientist and author, Stanford University

Download podcast at - http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/fuhgeddaboudit

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.

Big Picture Science for Oct. 4th, 2021 - Home Invasions

Big Picture Science - Home Invasions

As we struggle to control a viral invader that moves silently across the globe and into its victims, we are also besieged by other invasions. Murder hornets have descended upon the Pacific Northwest, threatening the region’s honeybees. In Africa, locust swarms darken the sky. In this episode, we draw on a classic science fiction tale to examine the nature of invasions, and what prompts biology to go on the move.

Guests:

• Peter Ksander – Associate professor at Reed College in the Department of Theater. Producer of the spring 2020 production of War of the Worlds
• Eva Licht – A senior at Reed College, and producer and director of War of the Worlds
• Chris Looney – Entomologist with the Washington State Department of Agriculture, where he manages its general entomology laboratory
• Nipun Basrur – Neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University
• Amy Maxmen – Reporter at the journal Nature, in which her story about pandemic war games appeared.

This repeat podcast originally aired on August 31, 2020

Download podcast at - http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/home-invasions

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.