By Ilan Goodman: Neuroscience and philosophy podcaster
The podcast currently has 7 episodes available.
Vision is the best understood sensory domain. But smell is turning out to be wonderfully strange and even more complex than sight.
Dr Ann-Sophie Barwich joins me to explore ideas from her recent book Smellosophy. How is vomit related to parmesan cheese? Why do things smell so different depending on context? And what does smell teach us about the very nature of perception?
We explore:
Check out Dr Barwich’s book Smellosophy here, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674983694,
her article in Aeon magazine here https://aeon.co/essays/why-might-it-be-easier-to-fool-your-eyes-than-your-nose.
and another great piece in Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/91/the-amazing-brain/our-mind_boggling-sense-of-smell
***
To get in touch with Ilan or join the conversation, you can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast or on email at [email protected]
Could depression be caused by inflammation? Cambridge psychiatrist Ed Bullmore makes the case for his radical new theory, from his bestselling book The Inflamed Mind.
Here's the breakdown...
6:12 There’s a Cartesian divide in the way we practice medicine. Professor Bullmore argues that we need to find more integrated ways of treating body and mind.
8:52 The case of Mrs P who was suffering from arthritis and depression. But what was causing what?
12:31 Is this theory a biomedical or psychosocial approach to depression? Professor Bullmore argues that it can bridge the two.
18:07 There will never be just one theory for depression.
19:12 We chat through the enormous range of options on the DSM criterion for depression. Symptoms of depression can include losing weight and gaining weight, sleeping too much and sleeping too little.
21:50 Everyone has a 25% lifetime risk of depression - that’s 1 in every family.
23:11 Why depression may be a bit like fever: one symptom with myriad underlying causes, all of which need different treatments.
25:07 WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE? We finally get around to talking through the different sources of evidence for the Inflammatory theory of depression. Animal studies, longitudinal studies.
27:41 What is ‘inflammation’?
31:00 Can you have inflammation without having any apparent illness or injury?
35:40 Why you might want to try rubbing your auricles. Seriously, it’s nice.
38:47 Is it time to ditch the serotonin theory of depression once and for all?
44:22 Why did the big pharmaceutical companies start abandoning research into psychiatric drugs from 2010?
51:20 New research into the depression-inflammation link is now underway: what’s going on and what are we hoping to find?
54:52 Professor Bullmore shares his aspiration for the next 10 years: to integrate mental and physical healthcare in the way medical are trained and in the way they practice.
The Inflamed Mind at Amazon
Get in touch with Ilan or join the conversation! You can find NOUS on Twitter @NSthepodcast or on email at [email protected]
Patricia Churchland is the queen of neurophilosophy. She’s on fine form in this interview - charming, funny and occasionally savage as we range over her views on the nature of philosophy, the neuroscience and evolution of morality, and consider what’s wrong with the two major ethical traditions in western thought: utilitarianism and Kantianism.
1.43 - Is philosophy just a kind of science in its infancy - a ‘proto-science’ - or it is a special kind of conceptual analysis? Professor Churchland doesn’t pull her punches as she takes on the ‘language police’ approach to philosophy.
8.03 Why so much philosophy is useless. “They make finer and finer distinctions, which nobody in the sciences gives a tinker’s damn about!”
9.03 How epistemology is just ‘isms up the ying yang’!
10.40 What good work is being done in philosophy, and what makes it good? Walter Sinnott Armstrong, Owen Flanagan and Julian Savulescu get nods of approval.
12.00 We set to work discussing Professor Churchland’s book Conscience. Where does moral motivation come from in humans and other mammals?
16.20 Why was the evolution of warm-bloodedness important in this story?
18:00 The emergence of the cortex in mammals. Why the most sophisticated animals are the most helpless when they are born, and why it enables the most powerful learning.
20:40 Why the mammalian dependence on a caregiver is the origin of moral concern.
23.20 What precursors to moral behaviour do we see in chimpanzees, wolves and rodents?
28.40 What’s the difference between chimps and humans? It’s just more neurons! But, argues Prof Churchland, quantitative changes can beget qualitative differences in cognition and behaviour, as illustrated by advances in AI.
33.00 The Purveyors Of Pure Reason - what’s wrong with utilitarianism - and why is the contemporary Effective Altruist movement ‘a bit of an abomination’? Prof Churchland takes exception to the idea that 10 homeless folk should matter to her more than her own daughter, and defends the importance of community as a valid source of moral motivation. She explains why Russian philosophers called utilitarianism ‘Lenin’s Math.’
44.00 How can neuroscience and evolution theory tell us anything important about ethics? Prof Churchland tackles the naturalistic fallacy, and argues that the sciences can usefully constrain our theorising. She celebrates the contributions of Hume and Aristotle.
47.32 Why morality is a lot harder than most moral philosophers think: it’s not just about figuring out some simple over-arching principles. Moral issues are really practical problems, not primarily exercises in rational reflection.
54.25 There are no moral authorities - but that shouldn’t cause us existential angst. We should be like the Buddhists and Confucians.
TL:DR - Aristotle and Hume had it right: there are no moral authorities and no grand rules to live by. You gotta figure it out as you go along.
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This episode features a neurologist with some striking tales to tell about who we become when our brains start to break. What happens when memories are gradually destroyed by Alzheimer's, when our personality is drastically transformed by dementia, or when a sudden surge of creativity is unleashed by Parkinson’s medication?
Dr Jules Montague’s new book Lost and Found integrates moving stories of her own patients with philosophical ideas about personal identity. The result is a fascinating insight into the fragile and complex workings of the brain, and a profound and compassionate reflection on the relationship between memory, personality and identity.
6:26 What does memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease mean for identity?
13:32 Why the notion of ‘embodiment’ offers a richer understanding of identity
16:10 The Extended Mind theory - how phones and pens are part of our cognitive apparatus.
18:23 How our selves are created jointly, through relationships
23:09 The dynamic and unstable nature of memory
27:34 Why personality can be radically transformed by dementia
33:26 How dopamine medication can cause a surge of creativity
42:49 Tools of the neurologists’ trades: how simple questions and reflex hammers can reveal brain damage
Jules' book Lost and Found is now available in paperback, check it out here.
Thanks to the STS department at UCL, where this episode was recorded. Check out their full range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses here: www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/
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My guest in this episode is a neurogeneticist who is unafraid to tackle some of the most politically charged questions in science. Dr Kevin Mitchell is an associate professor at the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. His recent book INNATE sets out to show ‘How The Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are’, and in it he offers his take on the latest research into the biological underpinnings of intelligence, gender, sexuality, and psychiatric disorders.
We start off discussing the complexities of figuring out how genes link to psychological traits and how random ‘noise’ in the process of development may be crucial.
14:54 What’s the best metaphor for describing how genes work? Should we think of them as a blueprint, a program, a recipe or even a database?
21:52 I probe Kevin for his explanation of the Mystery of Missing Heritability. Why has molecular genetics not been more successful?
30:39 We tackle the brain differences between men and women, and explore the biological basis of homosexuality. Did you know we can deliberately breed homosexual rats?
45:44 We discuss Kevin’s view that psychiatric conditions are genetic and that genetics can transform the field.
58:11 Kevin leaves me with a brief, provocative outline of his view that we can have free will despite being in some sense biologically determined creatures.
Check out Kevin's book Innate: How The Wiring of Our Brains Makes Us Who We Are and also his blog Wiring the Brain.
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In this episode I meet a controversial clinical psychologist who thinks that mainstream mental health services are bad for us.
Dr Lucy Johnstone has worked for many years on the frontline of adult mental health services - helping those who may have been diagnosed with conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or clinical depression. It's a staggering fact that roughly a quarter of British adults have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder at some point in their lives. But Dr Johnstone thinks that these diagnoses are totally wrong - invalid and unhelpful. Giving someone a psychiatric diagnosis, she argues, is the first step drawing them into a system which treats them as if their problems are symptoms of a physical illness. But that, she argues, is wrong.
I interviewed Dr Johnstone at her home in Bristol, where we discussed her wide-ranging critique of psychiatry & her new initiative - the Power Threat Meaning Framework - the basis for a radically different approach to mental health which abandons diagnosis altogether and promises to treat individuals as ‘people with problems, rather than patients with illnesses’. She has said it’s the culmination of her life’s work.
Explore the Power Threat Meaning Framework here
See Lucy's latest book A Straight Talking Introduction to Psychiatric Diagnosis, and also Users and Abusers of Psychiatry.
Also mentioned in the interview:
Joanna Moncrieff's book The Myth of the Chemical Cure
Robert Whitaker's book Anatomy of an Epidemic
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Panpsychism can seem like a bonkers theory of consciousness, but according to Philip Goff and a growing chorus of leading thinkers - from philosophers to neuroscientists - it might just be right…
In this episode we discuss why Philip rates panpsychism as 'the worst solution to the problem of consciousness - apart from all the others.'
We explore his dramatic claim that Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington did for consciousness science what Darwin did for the science of life, how 'Galileo's Error' made it impossible for science to ever fully explain the experience of seeing a rose, and why the taste of Marmite can never be satisfactorily explained by neuroscience.
We also cover why physics can never tell us about the intrinsic nature of stuff - just how it behaves. And Philip shares his proudest moment in philosophy - when he persuaded Daniel Dennett he was wrong...
Links
Philip's book Galileo's Error: A New Science of Consciousness is available to order now, but will be released in August 2019, published by Rider in the UK, Pantheon in the US.
Find Philip on twitter @philip_goff. Check out his personal website including links to his academic publications here: www.philipgoffphilosophy.com
And his blog for a general audience: www.conscienceandconsciousness
Follow us on Twitter @NSthepodcast
The podcast currently has 7 episodes available.