All Episodes

#570 Brian Knutson: The Neuroscience of Emotions, and Economic Decision-Making

Jan 6, 2022

Dr. Brian Knutson is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. His research focuses on the neural basis of emotional experience and expression. His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience, and to explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and treatment of clinical disorders as well as for economic behavior. He is a fellow of the Academy for Behavioral Medicine Research and the Association for Psychological Science, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and numerous private foundations. More»
#569 Andrew Thomas: Ovulation, Mate Preferences, and Mating Strategies

Jan 3, 2022

Dr. Andrew Thomas is a Lecturer in Psychology at Swansea University, UK. His research is concerned with the differences in mating strategies within and between the sexes. This includes environmental and social factors which contribute to this variance and whether mating preferences themselves are reactive to environmental changes over short-term periods. He also has a secondary interest in cyber-psychology and online interaction; particularly how one represents oneself using internet avatars and aliases. More»
#568 Şerife Tekin: Philosophy of Psychiatry, Mental Disorder, The Self, and Flourishing

Dec 31, 2021

Dr. Şerife Tekin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Medical Humanities program at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Her work is in philosophy of science/medicine, philosophy of mind/cognitive science and bioethics. It is heavily informed by feminist and social epistemology. She has two co-edited edited books, The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry, and Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry: Responses to the Crisis in Mental Health Research, which adopts a Kuhnian approach to make sense of the existing research landscape in psychiatry. More»
#567 Chris Knight: The Cultural and Social Bases of Language

Dec 30, 2021

Dr. Chris Knight is Honorary Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Over many years, he has been exploring the idea that human language and culture emerged in our species not purely through gradual Darwinian evolution but in a cumulative process culminating in sudden revolutionary change. The details of his ‘sex strike’ theory remain controversial, but the general idea that the transition to language was a ‘major transition’ or ‘revolution’ (often termed the human revolution) has been current for many years and is now widely agreed. More»
#566 Joel Paris: The Current State of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

Dec 27, 2021

Dr. Joel Paris is Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, and Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at Sir Mortimer B. Davis-Jewish General Hospital. His research interests include developmental factors in personality disorders (especially borderline personality), and culture and personality. He’s the author of many books, including An Evidence-Based Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Fall of an Icon: Psychoanalysis and Academic Psychiatry, and Fads and Fallacies in Psychiatry. More»
#565 Iddo Landau: Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World

Dec 24, 2021

Dr. Iddo Landau is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa. He has written extensively on the meaning of life. He is the author of Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World. More»
#564 Hans-Georg Moeller - The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality

Dec 23, 2021

Dr Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macau. His research focuses on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (specifically Daoism) and on Social and Political Thought (specifically Social Systems Theory). He is the author of several books, including The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality. More»
#563 Robert Brooks Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers

Dec 20, 2021

Dr. Robert Brooks is Professor of Evolution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He studies the evolution of mate choice, the costs of being attractive, sexual conflict, the reason animals age and the links between sex, diet, obesity and death. He is the author of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World, and, more recently, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers. More»
#562 Jason Manning - Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction

Dec 17, 2021

Dr. Jason Manning is an Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He’s a theoretical sociologist who seeks to develop general explanations of human behavior, his work focuses primarily on conflict and social control, including various means of expressing grievances, handling disputes, and punishing offenses. Within this area he specializes in violent conflict, particularly in self-destructive forms of violence such as protest suicide, homicide-suicide, and suicide terrorism. His other interests include the sociology of science, sociology of religion, and neoDarwinian theories of culture. He is the author of Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction. More»
#561 Anna Warrener: The Evolution of the Human Pelvis, Bipedalism, and Childbirth

Dec 16, 2021

Dr. Anna Warrener is an assistant professor in the Anthropology department at University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on the evolution of the human musculoskeletal system using biomechanical techniques to assess how variation in physical structure affects locomotor performance. She is specifically interested in the human pelvis and how its unique anatomy impacts both locomotion and human birth. Dr. Warrener’s research has been published in PNAS, PLOS ONE, The Anatomical Record and other peer-reviewed journals and has also been featured in the BBC documentary “What Makes Us Human” and on NPR. More»