Minds Matter

A Minds Matter bonus episode! This week we step away from the research questions and have a chat with a Buddhist monk. Bhikkhu Sadaro (Kevin Berryman) is a Buddhist monk from the Ajahn Chah forest meditation tradition who has been practising for the last 17 years. We speak to him about everything from enlightenment, love, loss, and the self.

How do you feel about hierarchies? Dr. Sa-Kiera Hudson joins us to discuss how the answer may influence empathy and intergroup conflict. Support for hierarchies can lead not only to reduced empathy, but to increased counter-empathy for competitive groups. We further discuss what happens when hierarchies intersect and how psychology can study multiple identities (race, gender, sexual orientation) simultaneously.

Have you ever wondered why some days you order your same favourite meal whereas others you decide to try something new? How do we know when we should exploit previous choices or explore new possibilities? In this episode, Noor Sajid discusses her work on active inference, a framework that can answer this problem. Noor uses active inference to investigate many properties of our brain and behaviour, including why two brain lesions can be better than one. Ava & Beth talk through the basics of modeling and the motivations behind this scientific field.

What actually makes for good sleep? Dr. Lauren Whitehurst joins us to discuss how the brain, and crucially, the rest of the body, interact to support cognitive functions like memory consolidation and insight. Dr. Whitehurst shares how vital sleep is to overall health, and what happens when some communities systematically get less sleep than others. Beth & Ava discuss their own experiences with sleep spilling over into other facets of life.

Resilience is a word we hear all the time, but what does it actually mean to be resilient? In this episode, Dr. Lucy Hone discusses her work on resilience and well-being. Sharing her own lived experience with grief, Dr. Hone explains resilience doesn’t mean being fine all the time. We discuss how we can improve our resilience along with the science behind the ideas of gratitude and learned helplessness.

Do we see things the way they really are or do our biases and motivations influence our perception? Dr Yuan Chang Leong discusses his research on how our motivations influence how we see the world. If we are biased to see the world differently to others, can we ever really understand someone with different political beliefs? We discuss why we have these biases at all and how they may help us live better lives.

One of the first and strictest gun laws passed in the United States was the Mulford act of 1967, sparked by lawmakers perceived threat of the Black Panthers. Thus, the launch of the gun restriction movement was a targeted effort to limit Black Americans' gun access. How does this history influence attitudes about guns in the U.S. today? Dr. Gerald Higginbotham discusses the importance of history as a context in which to consider present-day attitudes, and how our own perceptions of history, like how long ago we feel the Tulsa Race Massacre happened, may in turn influence our current attitudes and support for policy.

Why do some people amass have friends effortlessly while others remain isolated? Dr. Elisa Baek tells us about her work using social network analysis to examine the differences between the brains of well-connected and lonely people. Dr. Baek also shares why those with the most friends might not be the most magnetic or charismatic, but might rather be those with the strongest need to belong.

What comes first, language, or emotion? In this episode, Dr. Ajay Satpute shares his work examining how the brain and mind interact with language to create and process emotion. Is jumping when seeing a spider the same as worrying about a loved one passing away? Why do we call so many different experiences 'fear'? We discuss how we can apply this knowledge to our everyday lives, including mental health.

To kick off season 2, we are joined by Dr. Kelsey Perrykkad, a post-doc at Monash University. Dr. Perrykkad tells us about her work on understanding the self, in the framework of predictive processing. We discuss what predictive processing actually is, whether people can change, and why the self feels the way it does... and more!