Author: This Is Your Brain producer
The human brain did not evolve to read — but reading makes us more fully human as it opens up new worlds of understanding and empathy. Today, as we read so much by “skimming” on phones and tablets, we’re missing out on the sophisticated thought processes that deep reading provides. Dr. Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, and the author of several books on literacy, joins us this week to discuss how reading in a digital era affects our critical thinking and leaves us vulnerable to misinformation. Plus…is dyslexia actually a…
New parents – especially moms – experience profound changes in the brain when they are expecting and welcoming a new baby. Health journalist Chelsea Conaboy explains how the caricature of “mommy brain” and its cognitive fog has it all wrong – parenthood actually has a neuroprotective effect, as the brain adapts to meeting the needs of children. It happens to all parents, not just mothers, but it’s most dramatic in gestating parents. Plus… how it takes a troop to raise a monkey. Phil Stieg: Hello I’d like to welcome Chelsea Conaboy, a health and science journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner. Importantly for…
Teen brains are uniquely primed for addiction — that age is all about novelty seeking, risk-taking, and impulsivity, a developmental stage with strong drives and little inhibition — and they “learn” the pleasures of alcohol and drugs a little too well. Judith Grisel, PhD, a behavioral neuroscientist at Bucknell University who has written widely (and from personal experience) about the brain chemistry of addiction, explains why the urge to feel good “on demand” is so difficult to resist, and how the brain adapts to highs and lows. Fortunately, she also explains the path to life after addiction. Plus… why smelling…
Bonus clip from Engaging Your Spiritual Core with Dr. Lisa Miller.Narrator: Thank you for downloading this bonus clip from This Is Your Brain. In this excerpt Dr. Lisa Miller recounts her journey to parenthood through adoption, and what she learned about the importance of being open to what life is trying to teach us.Phil Stieg: You go into great detail about the challenges you had in terms of childbearing. Did that play a role in your decision to write this book?Lisa Miller: I think 98% of suffering comes from an attachment to thinking we need to get what we want.…
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…