We talk with Professor Gail Sahar about her new book, entitled "Blame and Political Attitudes: The Psychology of America's Culture War", where she applies social psychology to understand where and why we assign blame in the political sphere.

https://www.amazon.com/Blame-Political-Attitudes-Psychology-Americas/dp/303120235X

We talk to Dr. Daniel Sternberg, head of data at Notion Labs, about how to understand new developments in AI (artificial intelligence) like DALL-E-2 and chatgpt. Topics include the possibility for general intelligence in AI, similarities between human cognition and generative AI models, and the potential for sentient AI.

Stephanie Preston (University of Michigan) returns to the show to talk about her latest research. Why do we hoard stuff? And how can we get people to care about the consequences of all that stuff on the environment? Her research has taken her from the strategies that some rats use to hide seeds (some hide in lots of small caches, while others hoard in a single location), to the cognitive/neural/emotional mechanisms of human beings with hoarding disorder. People tend to have emotional attachments to the stuff they own, and although most of us have more stuff than we need, for those with hoarding disorder it can be overwhelming.

In other recent research, Stephanie and her colleagues found individual differences in how connected people felt to the environment -- impassive people were less likely to be concerned about the destructive effects on the environment, and that politically conservative people tended to be more impassive.

Paper discussed:

Bickel, L. A., & Preston, S. D. (2022). Environmental impassivity: Blunted emotionality undermines concern for the environment. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001072

Special Guest: Stephanie Preston.

Joe and Rolf talk to Dr. Aric Prather, a clinical psychiatrist at UCSF and author of the new book "The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest" about why sleep is important, the relationship of stress to sleep, and how to tune your body and environment to get a great night's sleep.

Special Guest: Aric Prather.

Our guests, Dr. Sheila Macrine and Dr. Jennifer Fugate, discuss the concept of "embodied cognition" and its implications for the classroom. They argue that traditional cognitive psychology has ignored the fact that the brain is situated in the body, and that learning happens most effectively if it is connected with our body and our environment, rather than learned abstractly.

Joe and Rolf once again scry the future with bold and entirely accurate predictions about the year 2022

Joshua Miele is a blind scientist and inventor living in the Bay Area. Amongst his many initiatives is the Blind Arduino Project, where participants learn how to navigate a world of maker electronics that are really designed for the sighted. He talks to Joe and Rolf about his work to bring accessible and useful tools to the blind community. He teaches blind soldering classes, and he has worked to make braille maps easily accessible. He discusses what technology in recent years has helped the blind, and what hasn't.

Blind Arduino Blog: http://blarbl.blogspot.com/ Josh's Handle: @BerkeleyBlink Mailing list for the Bay Area blind arduino monthly meeting: babamm@groups.io

Special Guest: Joshua Miele.

The NIH Toolbox is the result of an ambitious project supported by the National Institutes of Health to develop a comprehensive, standardized, and highly accessible test battery to be used in research. Dr. Julie Hook is the Product Manager for the project and is in large part responsible for the development of the Toolkit. Rolf and Joe discuss with Julie a wide ranging set of topics related to the science of cognitive, sensory, and motor testing, including some of the core design principles and theortical considerations.

Enough with 2020. Rolf and Joe present their predictions for what lies ahead in 2021.....

Joe and Rolf talk to Dr. Bernard Baars, a leader in the field of consciousness research. Dr. Baars has recently published "On Consciousness", which is a compendium on his work integrating research in psychology and neuroscience on what consciousness is and how it functions. T

Special Guest: Bernard Baars.

David Rosen and Scott Miles of Secret Chord Laboratories (secretchordlaboratories.com) talk to Joe and Rolf about musical preference, the role of surprise in these preferences, what's going on in the brain, and how COVID is affecting the way we listen to music.

Discussion paper: "A Statistical Analysis of the Relationship between Harmonic Surprise and Preference in Popular Music" (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00263

Special Guests: David Rosen and Scott Miles.

An update on Episode 4, where we first discussed the phenomenon of the "Frey Effect" in which sounds are heard as a result of pulsed microwave radiation. The Frey Effect was proposed to be involved in attacks on the US embassy in Cuba. Could this also be going on in the US embassy in China? Rolf and Joe discuss further, and give a call out for any expertise that could be added.

In this half-hour episode, Rolf and Joe discuss research by Jennifer Mitchell and colleagues ("Dopamine, time perception, and future time perspective") showing that the drug tolcapone, which selectively increases dopamine in frontal cortical regions, has the effect of reducing the error in estimating how much time has passed. Individuals tend to systematicaly underestimate how much time has passed (think of impatient kids asking "are we there yet?"), and in this double-blind study, tolcapone nearly eliminated this effect, most dramatically for a 60 second interval.

Implications of the study are discussed, including what this says about an "internal clock", whether you should rush to get this drug, and how time perception is related to depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. We do not discuss the role of tolcapone in ending the world.

Since 1999, National Novel Writing Month has exploded in popularity, becoming one of the most creatively productive events in the world every November. Participants buckle down and write a 50,000-word novel in a month, many enjoying the social support from the NaNoWriMo community.

Founder Chris Baty joins us to talk about what he's been up to lately, as well as share some thoughts gained from his writing career. We talk about creativity, the power (or not-power, depending on your inclination) of narrative, what we would contribute to a post-apocalyptic team, and the anxiety of wanting to contribute more.

Special Guest: Chris Baty.

Evidence has mounted that high-impact sports like boxing and football can lead to later cognitive problems, and there is increasing awareness that concussions should be taken seriously. So how does this all happen, and should you be worried? We take a look at some recent studies that shed some light on the topic.

Articles: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2645104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104474311500041X

We talk about the history of research on intelligence. Is intelligence a real thing? What does it actually refer to, and can it be measured? Joe and Rolf discuss.

Is self-control something that we an think of as a resource that can be depleted and replenished? It's been a popular model in psychology for years, but it has come under question recently. We discuss "Why self-control seems like (but may not be) limited", a paper by Inzlicht and colleagues that proposes an alternate model.

Can we create life artificially? What would that even mean? Rolf and Joe talk about the field of Artificial Life, or "A-Life", which has worked toward the goal from a number of academic disciplines for the past thirty or so years. They think about different approaches, such as software, hardware, and biological artificial life, and consider what it might take to convince us that we have created something that would be considered life.

Dr. Stephanie Preston is our guest for this great conversation about the neural and evolutionary underpinnings of heroic behaviors. She proposes that heroism can be found across the phylogenetic spectrum, and acts of human heroism may have significant roots in conserved behavior patterns -- for example, the instinct for mother rats to retrieve and protect their young even at the risk of great personal danger.

We discuss what qualifies as heroism, how situations can cue (or inhibit) heroic behavior, and what the evolutionary advantage might be to put one's own genes at risk to save the life of another.

We also discuss the field of evolutionary psychology as a whole, and the way in which researchers think about it differently than it is often represented in popular press.

Special Guest: Stephanie Preston.

The psychologist Dan Wegner (1948-2013) had a lot of influential work. One of his most popular (and controversial) claims was that conscious will is an illusion. He wanted to sidestep the issue of whether or not "free will" in a metaphysical sense exists, and get to the more psychological issue of why human beings have such a strong feeling that their conscious intention is what causes their actions.

Can this be right? What exactly does Wegner mean, and does this mean we should abandon moral responsibility? Rolf and Joe get into the weeds sorting out how psychological insights can inform how we think about philosophical issues.

We talk with Adrian Nestor, a professor and researcher at the University of Toronto, Scarsborough, about his recent research, the state of current brain imaging technology, and some speculations about where the field is headed. Can mental images and thoughts be captured, decoded, and understood by a combination of electroencephalography and machine learning techniques? What is the hype and what is the reality?

Dr. Beatrice Golomb describes her paper, "Diplomats’ Mystery Illness and Pulsed Radiofrequency/ Microwave Radiation" which details the evidence for the theory that the Frey Effect is responsible for the Cuban embassy incident in 2016. She also details the (mis)handling of the New York Times story that popularized this claim as a leading theory of the incident.

Rolf and Joe tackle an interesting perceptual phenomenon called the Frey Effect. In the Frey Effect, first discovered in the 1960s, pulsed microwave beams can cause the perception of a high-pitched sound. This has come up in the news recently as an explanation of possible "attacks" on the American embassy in Cuba. How exactly does this work? Should it be something we should worry about? Discussion is based around UC San Diego professor Dr. Beatrice Golomb's paper documenting the case that the Frey Effect is responsible.

In part A of the episode, Joe and Rolf base discussion around "Rapid calibration of an intracortical brain–computer interface for people with tetraplegia" by Brandman et al., thinking beyond the hype to get a realistic picture of how things work in the field. It's not all like The Matrix (yet).

In this second part on brain-computer interfaces, discussion goes toward the more speculative. Joe and Rolf talk about Elon Musk's Neuralink project, which aims to fully connect brains with computers. Would this be possible? Could any system really read our thoughts in the way portrayed in science fiction? Should we even want this to happen? And most importantly, how does this affect the coming Robopocalypse?

Today on the show Rolf and Joe discuss the use of virtual reality for the treatment of mental health disorders like phobias and PTSD. They explore research from Dr. Skip Rizzo on the state of the art, discuss limitations of VR, and then engage in some wild and possibly irresponsible speculation.

In the inaugural episode of CogNation, Joe and Rolf talk about artificial intelligence that mimics the way people think. Along the way, they also talk about pneumatic tubes, uploading consciousness, and how we'll spend our time when robots do all the work. They touch on how this all inevetiably leads to robots taking over the world. The discussion is based around the article "Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People" by Brenden Lake, et al. This article focuses on recent progress in cognitive science that suggests that human-like thinking machines should leverage causal models of the world and be endowed with intuitive physics and psychology.