What am I? Challenge your perception of reality.

You are right, and everyone else is wrong. Okay, maybe not everyone else but a lot of people.
No matter what subject that is, we tend to think we are right most of the time.
After all, being right is soothing, while being wrong is a threat to our status.

But, if you are not wrong, how can you learn? How can you avoid new mistakes if there aren't any? How can you improve your behavior?

In this episode, Dr. Pascal Wallisch and I discuss why using your perceptions as a baseline for understanding your behaviors is not actually reliable.
If that is the case, can you even trust your perceptions to determine how other people's behaviors should be?

Dr. Wallisch studied "The Dress" and the "Laurel-Yanny" phenomena, which took over the internet a few years ago. He also helps us see that cognitive biases, although sometimes portrayed negatively, are just a natural way to help us survive and thrive in the world we live in.

Episode page

Resources:

• Dr. Pascal Wallisch’s profile at NYU
• Dr. Pascal Wallisch’s Website
• Dr. Pascal Wallisch’s Twitter
• Dr. Pascal Wallisch’s paper on Laurel-Yanny
• Original Laurel audio on vocabulary.com
• The Dress
• The rabbit-duck illusion
• You Are Not So Smart interview with Dr. Pascal Wallisch
• Left-brain interpreter concept from split-brain patients by Michael S. Gazzaniga

Do you hear what I hear?
Hearing is a two-step process. We first capture sound waves but then our brains combine that information with data from other senses and our priors.
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Rebecca Hirst, who is a post-doc researcher at The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing - TILDA, who focuses on understanding how information from different sensory inputs is integrated and generates our perceptions.
One of her main studies focuses on the Sound Induced Flash Illusion, or SIFI, and how that affects our perceptions as we age.


Episode's page

Resources:

• Dr. Rebecca Hirst’s profile at TILDA
• Dr. Rebecca Hirst’s Twitter account
• Dr. Hirst’s paper on the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion
• BBC Documentary “Do You See What I See?”
• Dr. Annalisa Setti
• Dr. Kyle Elliott Mathewson

Thiago and Katie recap and review topics covered in "Ep. 1 - In conversation with Dr. Nii Addy: Am I anxious?"

Are you anxious? We certainly are.
This year has brought some bad and unexpected news for all of us.
Some people have lost their jobs, many are stuck at home, and others need to face the fear of going out to care for others. Add to that, civil unrest and the current division happening across the world, and it makes for some interesting times.

In this first episode, Thiago Sindra talks to the neuroscientist Dr. Nii Addy, who is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale School of Medicine. Their chat brings excellent insights into what happens to our brains when we suffer from anxiety, depression, and addiction.
Dr. Addy talks about his work in the lab and how they're targeting specific receptors in the brain to understand the mechanism behind mental illnesses, and how Neuroscience can bring us together, even during difficult times. 

Episode's page

Resources:

• Dr. Nii Addy's profile at Yale
• Addy Lab's website
• Dr. Addy's study on muscarinic receptors M5
• Paper about acetylcholine as a neglected nicotinic modulator, mentioned by Dr. Addy in the interview
• Carl Hart: Exaggerating Harmful Drug Effects on the Brain Is Killing Black People. Paper published on Neuron - Cell Press
• BlackInNeuro.com and #BlackInNeuro on Twitter

In this very first trailer episode, Thiago describes what this podcast is about. This is an idea that's been evolving for a while and now became a podcast. Society is hurting, and despite of having good intentions we're always fighting for our space and stability. Understanding ourselves is the first step to comprehending others and making society better. How can the study of the brain can make us more open to challenging our perception of reality and questioning what we believe to know about ourselves? Let's find out together. Join us in the most intrigue and complex question of all: what am I?
 See it on the website: https://whatami.show/why-this-podcast%3F-1