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In this informative podcast, Robert K. Logan, the noted author of The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture, talks about human intelligence, language, and communication.
Logan holds a BS and Ph.D. from MIT. He completed two post-doctoral appointments as a Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and at the University of Toronto.
As a physics professor with an inquisitive mind, Logan has spent a lifetime studying the important elements of the human mind, and how we use our language, and intelligence. Logan talks about his idea of 'the sixth language,' which was the foundation for his book, The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age.
The professor and author explain that the six languages are comprised of the following: speech, writing, math, science, computing, and the internet. He talks about how each developed and emerged, as well as their relative impacts on society and culture.
Logan discusses a possible seventh language, which as he states could be 'social media,' 'artificial intelligence,' or maybe the smartphones we use daily that have irrevocably changed how we interact with each other as human beings. As Logan states, human intelligence is not merely the possession of information, but it's about our curiosity, our interest in knowing and understanding.
Leah Segedie, author of Green Enough: Eat Better, Live Cleaner, Be Happier (All Without Driving Your Family Crazy!), delivers a wealth of important information that we can all use to make smarter choices and lead healthier lives.
Leah Segedie is a passionate food activist and social media consultant. She is the founder of the Mamavation® community as well as the ShiftCon Social Media Conference. Segedie talks about her background and how she has always had an interest in being an activist. She talks about her father's death from cancer and how that impacted her.
Segedie talks in-depth about foods and products, with a special focus on 'indirect additives. Indirect additives actually become part of some foods, in miniscule amounts, throughout the processing and packaging of a particular food item. She discusses how these potentially harmful elements are ubiquitous in many food products on our grocer's shelves. Segedie talks about the potential for harm, and poses the question: how many of these hormone-disrupting chemicals can we build up in our bodies before they start to have a seriously detrimental effect, and begin to disrupt our entire system?
Segedie talks about marketing and how women think. She explains why some advertising works for women and why much of it doesn't. As she states, women want to be heard, respected, and valued, and if product makers listen to women's input, then their brand will be championed by women.
The food activist gives her thoughts on how society can move forward, and make better choices for food, products, etc. As she states, big companies are now acquiring many smaller companies, as people have begun to be more aware of health issues. As more and more people begin to make smarter choices regarding healthy products, naturally big companies will take note when they see a decrease in their market share. And this is the best way to make change happen, and ultimately get big corporations to manufacture better, healthier, less harmful products. Segedie is extremely passionate, and she works
tirelessly to help shape products and policy, striving to create a toxin-free world for us all.
In Greek mythology, the Pierian Spring was a sacred source of knowledge believed to inspire those who drank from it. Driven to create a similar collective source of information in the quickly evolving field of precision medicine,
Dr. Rakesh Nagarajan and his team at PierianDx have integrated technology, content, and human medical expertise to help provide insights for the treatment and management of complex medical conditions.
Click play to learn more about PierianDx's unique software and hear examples of how sequencing is already being used to help some conditions.
PierianDx works with some of the most advanced cancer centers, medical centers, laboratories, and health systems; visit PierianDx.com to learn more.
Quinn Burlingame, Ph.D., is an organic photovoltaic researcher and postdoctoral fellow in chemical sciences with the Loo Group at Princeton University. He joins us today to discuss recent advances in technology for organic semiconductors and solar cells. While the use of carbon and hydrocarbon-based materials for organic solar electricity is still a research-based technology, Burlingame reports that they are seeing rapid improvements in its efficiency and anticipates that it will soon be comparable with the more traditional silicon-based solar cells. Furthermore, the ability to make organic solar cells lightweight, flexible, and even transparent will open access to niches that aren't possible for silicon, such as use in windows.
Click play to hear more. Visit Burlingame's Twitter page @QuinnBurlingame and be sure to check out Andluca Technologies at https://andluca.com.
David Edelman, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College and former lecturer at the Department of Psychology University of California, San Diego. In this episode, Edelman gives us a peek into his research on the consciousness of non-human animals. Edelman's primary interest is visual perception and cognition in octopuses.
Listen in to learn about some of the octopus' sophisticated behavioral adaptations and find out why Edelman considers it a profoundly wonderful model organism for his research.
For more information, Edelman encourages you to keep up with his work and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth: https://pbs.dartmouth.edu.
In this episode, we hear from John Harte, Ph.D. and professor at University of California, Berkeley. Harte has studied the effects of climate change on our lives and our ecosystems in various habitats around the world. The science states quite clearly and unambiguously that the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that these changes are due to human activity. Additionally, Harte describes a feedback effect in which the ecosystem responds to these changes in a way that actually exacerbates the problem.
Climate change threatens all of life on earth, yet denialists and political pressures are impeding our transition to more sustainable ways of living. Click play to hear Harte discuss global warming, the biggest culprits, and specific ways we can help reduce our impact.
To learn more, go to https://hartelab.weebly.com.
Nessa Carey, author of Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance, discusses the interesting field of epigenetics.
Carey talks about the basics of epigenetics. Epigenetics is a scientific discipline that investigates and explains many things that cannot be succinctly explained by genetics alone. It seeks to answer the puzzling questions, such as how two things that are genetically identical can in fact be different from one another. Her field of epigenetics hopes to explain why different biological outcomes are possible. Epigenetics, as she states, refers to another level of information that is added to the DNA script.
The scientific author discusses stem cells, specifically focusing on the zygote, and the embryonic stem cell. Epigenetics informs our understanding of the complex structure and behavior of all biological life on Earth. It helps us to more fully grasp why simply mapping an organism's genetic code is not nearly enough to determine how it will develop or act.
Epigenetics, as Carey explains, is a broad topic. It demonstrates how nurture and nature can combine to successfully engineer biological diversity.
Carey discusses gene expression in a fetus, and how it can affect an individual for life. She discusses the connection between mother and fetus. And she talks about the passing of genetic information in the animal kingdom. Carey explains how they work with organisms in their study. She delves into a discussion of Darwinian evolution and how it relates to her area of study—epigenetics.
Continuing, she discusses chronic conditions that people suffer from, such as neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, etc. and why they take such a long time to develop. Carey is deeply involved with scientific studies and her work and writings in the field of epigenetics are truly must-reads for others in the field.
Janet Bennett, Speech Pathologist and founder of I Just Want To Sleep (ijustwanttosleep.com), provides an overview of her innovative treatment that can help people achieve more relaxing sleep.
Bennett is a successful Speech Pathologist with a private practice in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. She is passionate about her work as it is very personal and rewarding. Imagine helping someone learn to speak again after having a stroke. Imagine the joy a mother experiences as her brain-damaged child speaks to her for the very first time. These are powerful moments and Bennett takes pride in her work helping others.
Bennett talks about her background and discusses her innovative program. She states that she's been in the business of speech pathology for over 40 years and for the past 25 of those years she has specialized in treating tongue thrust. She discusses treatment and some of the various problems that can develop due to tongue thrust, such as buck teeth or an
open bite. The key is that tongue thrust can cause someone to swallow incorrectly. She recounts the amazing story of a 14-year old football player who had come to her for treatment, and how, to his family's surprise, her treatment ended his thunderous snoring. He acknowledged that his treatment had not only eliminated his snoring problem, but that he was more focused, was now making better grades at school, and he had even improved his speed on the field. This particular case was a true epiphany for the veteran speech pathologist, and marked the beginning of her work specifically to treat snoring.
Bennett explains mouth breathing, and how tongue exercises can train your tongue to live at the roof of your mouth, forcing you to breathe more naturally through your nose. She discusses nitric oxide, which helps regulate the body and rejuvenates the body, and is produced by breathing through one's nose.
Bennett discusses how she made a checklist of various conditions that her patients suffered from, such as dry mouth, restless leg syndrome, sweating, heartburn, insomnia, high blood pressure, etc. After treatment, she says 94% of people stopped snoring. She explains her exercise program and how it is implemented. Bennett's IJustWantToSleep® program is unique. It's a tongue exercise program that has been proven to stop troublesome snoring that is due to mouth breathing and also incorrect tongue position.
Dr. Moshe Szyf, one of the preeminent pioneers in the field of epigenetics, provides an interesting overview of his life's work and specialization in social epigenetics.
Dr. Szyf earned a PhD from the Hebrew University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Working, researching, and educating through his James McGill Professorship and as a GlaxoSmithKline-CIHR Chair in Pharmacology, Dr. Szyf is breaking new ground in the field of epigenetics.
Dr. Szyf discusses his background, 40 years of scientific research in epigenetics devoted to understanding how genes can be programmed, with an intense focus on how different experiences in life impact their programming. Dr. Szyf's lab proposed that DNA methylation is a chief therapeutic target specific to cancer as well as other diseases, and they provided the initial set of evidence supporting the concept that the 'social environment' early in life may in fact alter DNA methylation. His lab's work essentially debuted the field that is known today as, social epigenetics.
The research scientist talks in detail about some of his early observations with rats, discussing how rats that lick their pups more frequently effectively alter their pups' lives for when they become adult rats themselves they will have different stress responsivity and different characteristics. Thus, high maternal care shapes the lifelong behavior and physical characteristics of their offspring. Dr. Szyf's work, as he states, is focused on fully grasping how these actions and behaviors alter how genes are programmed.
Dr. Szyf discusses the methods they use to study specific epigenetic changes, discussing in detail—proteins, DNA, and the various factors that impact genes and gene programming. Dr. Szyf talks about the many broad areas of application that the study of epigenetics can lend support to, from understanding aging to disease development.
Dr. Szyf provides a wealth of information on the changes in cancer cells, systemic changes, and the specific alterations in various genes. And he discusses epigenetic approaches to manage/prevent/intervene in cancer without needing to resort to the traditional, and toxic, solutions currently used to treat cancer in the modern world of medicine.
Dr. Szyf is the co-director of the Sackler Institute for Epigenetics and Psychobiology at McGill and an esteemed Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Experience-based Brain and Biological Development program.
What is the function of dreams? Why do we dream at all, and why do we remember so little of them when we do? These are just a couple of the questions that drove Michael L. Perlis, Ph.D., to dive into the world of sleep medicine and research when he was still in his early twenties. Today, he is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and spends most of his time conducting research on insomnia, placebo, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for insomnia research. He joins the podcast to discuss a number of interesting subjects, including REM sleep and dreams, lucid dreaming, subjective experiences in insomnia, the need for more CBT for insomnia therapists, his opinion of the idea that establishing a sleep hygiene routine can fix sleep problems, how insomnia may have evolved, and so much more.
Press play for all the details and visit www.cbti.directory to find a CBTI specialist near you.
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