The Room of Lives

Sreya Majumdar, PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, and Fulbright-Nehru fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, studies natural birthing practices and reproductive justice.We begin with her story of growing up in the foothills of India in a mixed culture, challenging social norms to pursue athletics. Then an incident involving a friend’s unwanted pregnancy drew her interest towards the culture and taboos in India around sex, pregnancy and birthing. We discuss how the over-medicalization of pregnancy has marginalized midwife-assisted births at home, and taken autonomy away from women. Is natural childbirth at home riskier than at the hospital? Does the pain of birth need to be dulled? Sreya shares her research, her experience of attending a live birth, and her vision for birthing practices in the future, including for herself.

Content warning: death and suicide.Psychology PhD student Hannah Lunkenheimer studies beliefs and rituals surrounding death across human cultures.We begin with Hannah's life story: in high school she lost a friend to suicide, and her community's reaction made her question, why is death so taboo?We discuss Hannah's research, then share our own relationships with death, and conclude with her thoughts on suicide.

A whirlwind tour with my friend Jackie (嘉雯) on a bewildering range of topics.First, my weird belief that today’s electronic devices and digital content are the result of our desire to manifest Platonic ideals in reality. How do perfect ideas appear in an imperfect world? Do we know how our mind reaches its conclusions? Why was I in deep denial in a past relationship, when it’s so clear to see through it now? Why do we enter and stay in unhealthy relationships? We talk about scarcity vs fulfillment in romantic and platonic relationships. Is the love we are looking for locked inside other humans? What is true love, and what is the point of loving others? Are humans naturally materialistic? Why am I not already spiritually perfect? Would I take a pill that instantly delivers a lifetime’s experience? We talk about total connection to life, and about suffering: how it dilates time, and how we can open to our suffering with kindness and space.

Neuroscientist Rishi shares his intense episodes of Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder around fears of death that began in high school, which caused him, for example, to wash his hands until they bled. He shares his interest in Zen Buddhism, vipassana meditation and mysticism, and how they helped with intrusive thinking. We conclude with his vision for the future of his life and neuroscience research.

Neuroscientist Rishi tells me about his time wandering around the colonial Indian city of Kolkata where I am from, while he wrote for a newspaper and a cookbook. We then explore his ideas for a structuralist cookbook on the theory and general organizing principles of Indian cooking.

“When I was younger, I thought that you could think your way to an understanding of the universe. As I get older, I am more convinced that all of the interesting stuff happens in engagement with the world.”Neuroscientist Rishidev Chaudhuri shares his trajectory from studying physics with a platonic idealistic philosophy, to studying biology with a pragmatist philosophy. Unlike physics, there is no fundamental theory of how brains work, and everything’s messier. In this context, we ask: what is meant by a useful theory in science? We then discuss our views on the hard problem: how consciousness arises in the material world.

Neuroscientist Rishi talks about his research: the tradeoffs that our brain has to make in its functioning, and how its different parts may work at different time-scales. We discuss distributed computing in the brain: how do millions of neurons collaborate without an organizing center?Rishi explains his work of using math and computer science to understand how our brains efficiently pack and correctly recover our memories, and of finding patterns in the neural firing of awake and asleep mice.

“I feel like a postcolonial creation that couldn’t have existed a 100 years ago. It makes me restless and want to move around.” In this episode, neuroscientist Rishi shares his experience of living in an intersection of cultures, and we talk about the cultural and social contrasts that we perceive between India & the United States.

Rishidev Chaudhuri is professor of Mathematics and Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. He is one of the smartest people I've ever known, with incredible curiosity, talent, experience and wisdom across a wide range of intellectual, artistic and spiritual pursuits.In this episode, we talk about Rishi’s strange and varied life trajectory so far, such as working in a farm in South India and as a journalist in Kolkata, and then his educational journey and interests in neuroscience.

Why all of this: life, the universe, and everything? My search led me to non-duality.