PodcastDirectory.com's listings of the All In The Mind Podcasts

2010-02-06 Stem cells and brain tales

Acclaimed neuroscientist Fred Gage is a serial trailblazer. Decades of dogma were overturned when his team confirmed the adult brain continues to make new brain cells. Incredibly, now scientists can even turn skin cells into brain cells with a chemical push! But, if their potential to treat brain diseases or damage is to be realised, transplanted cells need to be able to call your brain home. Stanford biologist James Weimann has a major advance.

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Neuroscientist by day, novelist by night - David Eagleman has just written an extraordinary little novel about the afterlife. He´s also a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk. He joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation about life, death and the in-between.

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News of the largest studies on the genetics of autism to date is out, paving the way for genetic risk testing in the future. And, Australian research suggests autistic behaviours can be detected as early as eight months. So should we be screening newborns for neurological disorders like autism? The ethical debate unfolds on All in the Mind.

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Born into the bloody horror of war, Sudanese rap artist Emmanuel Jal was 9 when he was recruited into the Sudanese Peoples´ Liberation Army as a child soldier. Incredibly he survived, and his music reaches a generation of Lost Boys.

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Dreams feel meaningful—drawn from a mishmash of content from our waking lives. But it's a hot debate among scientists, who are yet to confirm why we sleep, let alone dream. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson's extraordinary experiments involve eavesdropping on the sleeping minds of rats. He proposes dreaming is central to how we remember and learn.

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Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak is a dream worker. To him dreams are an ecosystem of imaginings—powerful bodily experiences populated by characters with their own intelligences. When you encounter the images of your dreaming mind do you find one Self, or many? And, next week, a leading neuroscientist probing the possible link between memory and dreaming.

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Reading the minds of others can be darned hard. Are their intentions good, bad or indifferent? Whether we hold people accountable for their behaviour depends on the answer. Scientists probe questions like this through experiments. Philosophers traditionally appeal to intuition and argument. But now a young band of experimental philosophers are taking armchair philosophy to task, and digging for data.

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His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell and leading scholars in a dialogue about science and the self. This week, founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace consider with him what it takes to flourish...really flourish...individually and collectively.

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His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell and leading scholars in a dialogue about science, wellbeing and our moral minds. This week Harvard evolutionary biologist and author of Moral Minds, Marc Hauser, asks - does biology constrain our mind´s potential and our moral capacity? Is there a place for moral outrage? Next week, founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace join the fray.

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From the stage of the 2009 Mind and Its Potential conference, His Holiness the Dalai Lama joins All in the Mind's Natasha Mitchell in an extended conversation about the mind, science and much else. And, joining the dialogue over coming weeks is the founder of the field of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, leading Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace

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Evolution, mutation and transformation -- what do these themes evoke for you? Genes mutate, but so do bodies, brains and cultures. Celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and dive into the Gene Pool. We invited you to upload sounds, stories, and images to Radio National's social media site, Pool (http://pool.org.au), and to mutate and remix those of others. Catch All in the Mind's remix of your remixes!

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In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, top British climate scientist Mike Hulme wants to understand climate change as a psychological and cultural force. Anthropologist Jonathan Marshall has just edited a provocative collection of Jungian perspectives on climate change. They join Natasha Mitchell to discuss mythology, mental ecology and a changing climate.

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Beyond the hype of left brain versus right brain lies the work of acclaimed neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. His career was forged in the lab of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry, and together their trailblazing experiments have illuminated the differences between the brain´s two hemispheres. Today he´s on the US President´s Bioethics Council, heads up a major project on neuroscience and the law, and is a prolific writer of popular neuroscience.

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We can´t survive without them -- and we´ve long underestimated their prowess. Controversially, bacteria could even have cognitive talents that rival our own. Predatory behaviour, cooperation, memory -- Jules Verne eat your heart out -- Natasha Mitchell takes you on a strange adventure into the secret world of microbial mentality.

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Some call the eyes the window on the soul. Trevor Lamb has been gazing into the eyes of living fossil 'fishy' beings, and deep into evolutionary time to unravel the beginnings of our incredible seeing organ. And what about its future? A myopia explosion in East Asian cities has folk worried, and there's good evidence for a surprising cause.

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Heard the one about the psychiatrist, the Supreme Court judge and the philosopher who walked in to a radio studio...? Join Natasha Mitchell and guests in a round-table interrogation of how the brain sciences are changing our understanding of addiction, and the powerful consequences for notions of free will, responsibility and culpability.

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Mel was dux of her high school with bright prospects. At 25, she needs 24 hour family care, persecuted by a violent voice in her head who she calls Ron. Journalist Tom Tilley takes us to meet Mel and her family for a rare, raw and intimate insight into the experience of hearing voices; and reports on current uncertainty over causes and treatments. Features a special multimedia production. Video Watch a video feature from Triple J's Hack: Hearing Voices. When Ron went mad in Mel's mind sh ...

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German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger is one of the world´s top researchers on consciousness, instrumental in its renaissance as a respectable problem for scientific enquiry. From out of body experiences to lucid dreaming, anarchic hand syndrome to phantom limbs - his investigations have taken him to places few dare to go. Be spooked, bewildered and amazed.

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Quality Street was the first ABC weekly program dedicated to Poetry. It began in 1946 and ran for 27 years ...ending in 1973. What we are going to hear today are two programs, featuring AD Hope and Kenneth Slessor, from the later years of the show ...from April 1972 and March 1971. My First Aquantance with Poets is from April 1972 and features the then Emeritus Professor of English at the Australian National University, poet and essayist, Alec Derwent Hope. He talks about four poets who h ...

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Join us at the Dark Science night at Sydney´s Powerhouse Museum for a spectacle of side show science and (almost) R-rated research. Suspension artists hang from hooks through their flesh, tattoo artists ply their wares, and don´t miss the spiders and coffins too - it´s the science of fear and pain as you never heard it before

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