Neuroscientific evidence increasingly shows that consciousness is a remarkable but explainable function of a machinelike brain. Alan J. McComas' discusses his article for the American Scientist.

Alan J. McComas is an emeritus professor of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

Greg is the Executive Director and Founder of the World War II Discussion Forum (wwiidf.org). He also has a strong interest in literature, culture, religion, science and philosophy (translation: he's an eclectic reader who is constantly missing deadlines for book reviews).

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Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Dr. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism (Penn State UP, 2024) traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth.

Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, this book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists—Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Strauss, Aleksandr Scriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Andrei Bely, and Rainer Maria Rilke—At the Crossroads of the Senses reveals the color-forms and color-sounds that, for these artists, laid the foundations of the world and served as the catalyst for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle.

Rooted in archival research in Russia, Germany, France, and the Czech Republic, At the Crossroads of the Senses taps overlooked scientific sources to offer a fresh perspective on European modernism. Sensory studies scholars, literary critics, and art and music historians alike will welcome its many contributions, not least among them a refreshing advocacy for a kind of sensuous reading practice.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ.

The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century.

But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror.

These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner.

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As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones. In How to Change a Memory, Ramirez draws on his own memories--of friendship, family, loss, and recovery--to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing.

A future in which we can change our memories of the past may seem improbable, but in fact, the everyday act of remembering is one of transformation. Intentionally editing memory to improve our lives takes advantage of the brain's natural capacity for change.

In How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past (Princeton UP, 2025), Ramirez explores how scientists discovered that memories are fluid--they change over time, can be erased, reactivated, and even falsely implanted in the lab. Reflecting on his own path as a scientist, he examines how memory manipulation shapes our imagination and sense of self. If we can erase a deeply traumatic memory, would it change who we are? And what would that change mean anyway? Throughout, Ramirez carefully considers the ethics of artificially controlling memory, exploring how we might use this tool responsibly--for both personal healing and the greater good.

A masterful blend of memoir and cutting-edge science, How to Change a Memory explores how neuroscience has reached a critical juncture, where scientists can see the potential of memory manipulation to help people suffering from the debilitating effects of PTSD, anxiety, Alzheimer's, addiction, and a host of other neurological and behavioral disorders.

Steve Ramirez has been featured on CNN, NPR, and the BBC and in leading publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, Forbes, The Guardian, The Economist, and Nature. An award-winning neuroscientist who has given TED talks on his groundbreaking work on memory manipulation, he is associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism is more of a curse than a blessing?

As Dr. Justin Gregg puts it in his book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown (US), 2022, Hodder (UK), 2023), there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process.

In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Dr. Gregg highlights features seemingly unique to humans – our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness – and compares them to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The human brain is perhaps the most intricate and fascinating object in the known universe. Through a mysterious process, the activity of billions of neurons within a few pounds of matter generates the unfathomable complexity of the mind.
Lectures in Neuroscience is a conversational and accessible introduction to the brain. Beginning from basic elements of neuroscience, the acclaimed scientist Rafael Yuste guides readers through increasingly sophisticated topics, developing a unified framework for how the brain functions. He describes how the brain is organized and how it develops, how neurons operate and form neural circuits, and how these circuits function as neural networks to generate behavior and mental states.
Yuste challenges the traditional view that the brain is an input-output machine that reacts reflexively to sensory stimuli. Instead, he argues, the purpose of the brain is to make a predictive model of the world in order to anticipate the future and choose successful courses of action. He gives readers insight into the workings of sensory and motor systems and the neurobiological basis of our perceptions, thoughts, emotions, memories, and consciousness.
Peppered with anecdotes and illustrated with elegant drawings and diagrams, this succinct and cohesive book is accessible to readers without previous background in the subject. It is written for anyone seeking to grasp the core principles of neuroscience or looking for a fresh and clear perspective on how the brain works.

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Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals how central attention is to all of these functions, and how interactions with nature can restore it. Nature and the Mind is both an introduction to a revolutionary new scientific field and a helpful guide to better living.

In these pages, he draws on his original research and research from others and shares life-altering findings such as:
-Just eleven more trees on your street can decrease cardio-metabolic disorders like stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.
-A short walk in nature can improve attention by almost twenty percent, decrease depression symptoms, and make people feel more spiritual and self-reflective.
-More greenspace around schools and homes is related to better school performance, reduced crime, and improved working memory.
-Many of these effects can be achieved even if you don’t like nature.
With an engaging and approachable style, Dr. Berman offers the nature prescription for physical health, mental health, and social health. Importantly, you don’t have to pack up your house and move to the country to participate. The nature prescription includes practical ways to bring the outside indoors and to “naturize” our spaces, no matter where you live. The positive effects of nature don’t just end at the individual; contact with nature can make people more caring towards one another, encourage people to care more for the environment, and more.
This groundbreaking guide explains why and how nature is good for our brains and bodies and gives us a window into fundamental aspects of our psychology and physiology that can be improved through interactions with nature.

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Your brain is the most remarkable thing in the known universe. Always trying to mend itself, and always trying to protect you, it’s in a constant state of flux — adapting, reconfiguring, finding new pathways. And it has an astonishing capacity for recovery.

 Rachel Barr struggled through years of devastating loss, heartache, and uncertainty until neuroscience gave her the first spark of self-belief she had felt in her adult life — and proof that, because of the brain’s near-infinite potential for neuroplastic change, it’s never too late to carve out neural pathways to form new habits, new skills, and new ways of thinking.
Whether you want to nerd-out on neuroscientific acronyms, finally understand what’s going on in your head, or take refuge in a book that’s like a warm hug for your mind, How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend is a delight-filled, evidence-based guide to taking better care of your brain — so it, in turn, will take better care of you.

Our guest is: Rachel Barr, who holds a master’s degree in molecular neuroscience. She wrote How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend while working on her Ph.D. Her videos as “Rachel the Neuroscientist” demystify the fundamental principles of brain science, empowering people to make informed decisions about their mental health. She was born and raised in Fife, studied in Bristol, and is now based in Quebec, with Gnocchi the cat.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications--for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.

An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.

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With breathtaking complexity and haunting beauty, the songs of whales have long fascinated scientists. Whales are the only mammals that can sing continuously for ten hours or more, changing the unique songs they sing every year. In Why Whales Sing (JHU Press, 2025), bioacoustician and cognitive scientist Eduardo Mercado transforms our understanding of these enigmatic sounds and proposes a groundbreaking theory that challenges decades of established science.

Fifty years of field research have led most scientists to conclude that humpback whales sing for the same reason that birds do: to advertise their sexual fitness. But if whale songs are nothing more than tools of attraction, why do whales sing even when they're alone and there are no listeners nearby? In light of modern advances in neuroscience and ocean acoustics, Mercado reaches the surprising conclusion that whales may not actually be "singing," but rather engaging in an activity more commonly associated with dolphins and bats--echolocating--which enables them to see their world with sound. By incessantly streaming sounds while listening closely to the returning echoes, whales may be actively tuning their brains in ways that allow them to monitor the movements of silent whales located miles away.

Sophisticated, long-range sonar can enable whales to perceive their vast underwater worlds in unimaginable ways. From the military origins of whale song recordings to the persistent mysteries of cetacean communication, this book displays the wonder of whales and reshapes how we view their intelligence, behavior, and acoustic mastery.

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