Smooth Brain Society

Dr. Faye Skelton is the program lead for Applied Criminology and Forensic Psychology at the Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. She joins us to talk about miscarriages of justice, factors involved in wrongful imprisonment, false confessions and memory issues which affect eye witness testimony. Lastly, Faye talks about how some of these can be fixed and tools which may help in future identification like police facial composites.

Dr. Faye Skelton
https://www.napier.ac.uk/people/faye-skelton 

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Some people are poorer at identifying faces. Dr. Tirta Susilo, Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, talks about what prosopagnosia is, what research tells us about how we perceive faces and objects, and what about those who have super face recognition abilities?

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Dr. Andrew Lensen and Amer Hussain from the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington come on the podcast to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI). They cover how it works, the different types of AI, ethics around data protection and the shortfall in the current laws to protect people when it ultimately takes over. 

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It's election and rugby world cup time in Aotearoa New Zealand and Professor Marc Wilson and his team from Victoria University of Wellington are surveying the nation on aspects ranging from general well-being to politics in order to get a snapshot of the people of the country. Marc along with co-researcher Terise Broodryk join us to discuss the survey, some of the preliminary findings and how the nation has changed since Marc first started these surveys back in 2009.

The original article advertising the survey is linked here.

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Dr. Marina Wimmer, Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University calls in from Scotland to talk about the perception of ambiguous figures, "seeing" images without any stimulus and the development of false memories. She talks about her research with children on the development of cognitive processes underlying these phenomena

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Dan Zia Joseph, author of Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts, joins from the United States to speak about mental health among military personnel and veterans, the importance of understanding mental health as a leadership quality, steps to improve mental health, his research on jiujitsu as a mechanism for anxiety control and his upcoming books. 

Dan's website: https://combatpsych.com/

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Multiple factors shape the complex relationships people have with their own culture and identity. This particularly affects indigenous communities the world over and has given rise to a wave of leaders working towards uplifting their communities into mainstream discourse. Rirwai Fox, Principal Kaupapa Māori Researcher, Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand and Ellie Rukuwai, PhD student focusing on the role of identity and culture in perfectionism and NSSI within rangatahi Māori (youth) join Sahir to talk about cultural embeddedness, the importance of community research and the unique challenges Māori and other indigenous people face in terms of identity, culture and navigating through the world. 

Māori Cultural Embeddedness has been defined as: The degree to which actions or behaviours of an individual are aligned with the core beliefs, practices and values of the Māori culture.

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Professor Paul Jose is a developmental, cross-cultural and political psychologist currently working at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the first psychologist to develop a thorough measurement of the concept of wokeness and joins us to define what wokeism is, where people in political discourse go wrong, why it is so polarizing and what are the results of his initial research on participants from USA and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Apologies for the audio quality on this episode.  Our computer shut itself down so we had to use the back up file recorded on the voice recorder on Sahir's phone (blame him for not having a good phone). Incredible salvage job by our producer Alex. 

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Dr. Kasia Kostyrka-Allchorne is the lead researcher of two National Health Service (NHS) projects in the United Kingdom. One looks at the use of mental health apps for parents with neurodiverse children (OPTIMA) and the other is setup to understand the risks and benefits of mental health digital technology use (DIORA). She calls in to the podcast to discuss her work on these projects and their relevance in an increasingly digital world.

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Dr. Marianne Reddan, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York City, USA. Joins Sahir and Olivia to talk about social factors which influence pain. We try to improve our understanding of what pain is, how emotional pain is different from physical pain and how acute pain works differently from chronic pain. We cover factors such as peoples relationships, economic status, gender and race in perception of pain along with the associated brain pathways involved in pain perception.

Marianne Reddan 

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