Smooth Brain Society

Associate Professor Gina Grimshaw leads the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Victoria University of Wellington. She joins to talk about emotions and her research on how emotional states affect cognitive processes like attention, language, and executive control. Gina also gives us an intro into multiple aspects of emotions such as the association of emotions with colors and why artificial intelligence is poor at detecting emotions. 

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Dr. Mehmet Orhan, Associate Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior at EM Normandie Business School joined us to talk about authorship inequality, elite dominance, and the ethical and problematic issues of doing science and academic careers. It covers issues such as unequal opportunities and bias in journal publications and how this inequality of research output can influence societies. Dr. Orhan also talks about how the academic system is setup against young researchers through what he describes as "academic rackets." 

Mehmet Orhan link

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Dr. Hugh Turpin of Oxford University joins Feryl and Sahir on the podcast to share his work on  the decline of Catholicism in Ireland and the factors which have led to it. We also cover his current research with the Explaining Atheism project about understanding how Ireland, Northern Ireland and Poland, 3 regions with strong religious identities have seen steep declines in religious beliefs in recent years. We cover his book "Unholy Catholic Ireland: Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion" and discuss the history of religious identity in Ireland and what the future might hold.

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For the very first episode of our collaboration with Europe's Journal of Psychology, Rachael Loxton joins to discuss her research paper titled “Liberty Can Be for You One Thing, and for Me Something Different”: Muslim Women's Experiences of Identity and Belonging in Switzerland.
This paper investigates how these concepts are experienced by Muslim women in Switzerland, a minority group targeted in the political campaign nicknamed the “burka ban.” We go through the key research questions, background and the main findings centered around: How do Muslim women construct their identity in Switzerland? How do Muslim women experience a sense of belonging in Switzerland?

Link to the article: https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.10623

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Dr. Martin Lang is assistant professor at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. And is the Director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA). He joins us to talk us through how rituals form and the roles they have played in fostering cooperation. We discuss the benefits of rituals in reducing anxiety and his current work on why we are seeing a decline in certain rituals along with the rise of non-theism, particularly in nations with greater existential security.

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Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru is a Māori technology ethicist specializing in Māori rights with Artificial intelligence, Māori Data Sovereignty and Governance with emerging digital technologies and biological sciences. He brings his extensive expertise in advocacy for digital Māori rights and data sovereignty and experience in roles including  Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor – Expert Advisory Committee on Artificial Intelligence. We discuss the issues facing indigenous communities with regards to current data systems, biases in artificial intelligence models, how to go about creating equitable systems of AI and what some of the future discussions policy makers need to be having.

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Dr. Kate Witt, lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, joins to discuss her research on Dopamine. Dopamine is an integral neurotransmitter, mainly associated with pleasure and motivation. Dr. Witt's work uses a genetically modified animal model to understand changes in behaviour focusing particularly on anhedonia (the inability to experience joy or pleasure), asociality (lack of social interactions) and avolition (lack of motivation).

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For the first episode of our Explaining Atheism series, Dr. Sara Rahmani from the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of Wellington joins us to talk about her project exploring Māori atheism. It explores the individual, sociocultural and historical processes contributing to Māori deconversion.

https://www.explainingatheism.org/research-projects/explaining-mori-atheism-in-aotearoa-new-zealand

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Smooth Brain Society is collaborating with the Explaining  Atheism Project to bring you a brand new series focusing on non-religion.  Over the course of the series we will have multiple guests from across the world explaining the factors which lead to atheism or non-belief and how religion has changed over time. This introductory episode talks about the program, what its aims are and why such work is even needed? Feryl interviews the core team members Dr. Aiyana Willard and Dr. Connair Russell to take you through what the project is all about and what you can expect in the coming series.


Youtube: @explainingatheism3541
Instagram: @explainingatheism
Twitter/X: @ExplainingAthe1

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Professor Kate Jeffery, Head of School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. Discusses her work on our idea of place, space and navigation. We get an introduction to place cells which are the neurons in the brain which help us identify our location in space. We speak about how these were discovered how they work and where research on our understanding of place and direction is going.

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