Author: This Is Your Brain producer

You know what you have to do to tighten your abs (whether or not you actually do it), but do you know how to awaken your brain? Lisa Miller, professor of psychology at Columbia University, explains how we humans are hard-wired for spirituality, but we’ve lost the connection. Faith-based traditions once connected most of us to something larger than ourselves, and without that, we’ve entered a self-centered age of widespread depression, addiction, and suicide. Dr. Miller has insight into how to awaken our brains and reconnect to the deeper force in life, even if you don’t believe in a god.Phil…

Bonus clip from Presence: Hallucination or Visitation, with Dr. Ben Alderson-Day. Narrator: Thank you for downloading this bonus clip from This Is Your Brain. In this excerpt, Dr. Ben Alderson-Day describes his recent visit to the lab of a fellow Presence researcher Dr. Olaf Banke in Geneva Switzerland, where he has able to elicit his own personal experience of a “presence” using virtual reality goggles and a robot which interrupts the sensory feedback loop. Phil Stieg: So, Ben, tell me a little bit about the robot as it relates to presence. Ben Alderson-Day: This is an experimental procedure devised by…

Bonus clip from Thinking in Pictures, with Dr. Temple Grandin.Narrator: Thank you for downloading this bonus clip from This Is Your Brain. In this extended outtake from our interview with Temple Grandin, we get an insight into Dr. Grandin’s unique thinking process and how her memory is organized. She describes this process as her visual database, where all her individual memories are indexed by discrete visual details.This narrative of her investigations into the Boeing 737 Max Eight disasters illustrates how her self-described, bottom-up thinking is based on freely associating a string of detailed images.Phil Stieg: I was curious about how…

Have you ever felt a “presence” – someone next to you, even speaking to you, when no one is there? Dr. Ben Alderson-Day, a psychologist at Durham University in the UK, studies the phenomena of felt presences, or what he calls “the unseen other.” These experiences are not always symptoms of mental illness – these are universally reported and not always distressing. Learn what’s happening in the brain during these hallucinations – or should we call them visitations? Plus… how the Internet brings together groups of people who can conjure up invisible friends, seemingly on command. Phil Stieg:  Hello I’d…

Temple Grandin, PhD., wants kids — especially those on the autism spectrum — to start using their hands again. The woman Oliver Sacks called “the anthropologist on Mars” explains how our brains may be naturally wired to think in words, mathematics, or visuals, and there’s nothing disordered about any of them. Dr. Grandin urges us to respect our young visual thinkers and celebrate their strengths instead of labeling them with disabilities. Phil Stieg:  Hello. My guest today is Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University. With her fascinating ability to understand how animals think, she transformed…

Some 6 million Americans suffer from active PTSD at any given moment, and nearly half of us will be exposed to major trauma at some point in our lives. Dr. Shaili Jain, a Stanford University psychiatrist and PTSD specialist, explains why silence plays such a large role in the aftermath of trauma, why some people recover quickly and others don’t, and why men experience more trauma but women are more likely to develop PTSD. Plus… mitigating trauma with the help of “man’s best friend.” Phil Stieg: Hello I’ like to welcome Dr. Shaili Jain, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences…