Anjie chats with Dr. Laura Gwilliams. Laura is an assistant professor at Stanford University, jointly appointed between Stanford Psychology, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science. Her work is focused on understanding the neural representations and operations that give rise to speech comprehension in the human brain. In this episode, Laura introduces her recent paper titled” Large-scale single-neuron speech sound encoding across the depth of human cortex”. She shares the insights we can derive from a recently developed technique called Neuropixels, which is essentially a tiny needle that can be placed into the human brain and record from hundreds of neurons at the same time. She also shares her personal journey into this line of work.

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Laura’s paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06839-2

Laura’s personal website:https://lauragwilliams.github.io/

Laura’s lab website:https://gwilliams.sites.stanford.edu/

Anjie’s: website: anjiecao.github.io

Anjie’s Twitter @anjie_cao

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

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Eric chats with Paul van Lange, Professor of Psychology at the Free University of Amsterdam and Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford. He is well known for his vast work on trust, cooperation, and morality, applying these themes to everything from Covid to climate change. He has published multiple handbooks and edited volumes on these topics.

In this chat, Eric and Paul talk about the psychological barriers that stop people from fighting climate change. What do trust and cynicism have to do with it? What are barriers to cooperation more generally? Why do selfish people often believe others are selfish too, but kind people don’t think everyone is kind? Might most strangers actually be nice, despite all the stranger danger we always hear about? Finally, Paul shares if all his work on trust and cooperation has changed how he looks at the world and compares research in psychology in Europe to the US.

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Links:

Paul's paper on climate change
Paul's website
Paul's Twitter @PaulvanLange

Eric's website
Eric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsy

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you think of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com

In this episode, Adani chats with Dr. Halie Olson! Halie is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Her research explores how early life experiences and environments impact brain development, particularly in the context of language, and what this means for children’s outcomes.

Halie talks about the intriguing backstory and results of her recent pre-print paper titled “When the Brain Cares: Personal interests amplify engagement of language, self-reference, and reward regions in the brains of children with and without autism.” In particular, she discusses what it means to be really interested in something, and how our brains respond to language about things we’re personally interested in. Halie also shares how she first got involved in research, her favorite parts about science, what she is excited to work on next, and a fun book recommendation!

If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe to our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.

Halie’s paper: https://doi.org/10.1101%2F2023.03.21.533695
Halie's website: halieolson.com

Adani’s website: adaniabutto.com

Podcast Twitter: @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Let us know what you thought of this episode or the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com