Author: This Is Your Brain producer

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…

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…