On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast,  We're joined by neuroscience power couple Ian Blum and Robin Keeley for a discussion on the difficulties of being in a relationship where both people want academic positions, or the two body problem, and ethical issues surrounding a recent paper genetically modifying human embryonic cells.  This week’s paper uses a modification of traditional drosophila learning models to compare the neural circuit used for visual and olfactory memories, and we spend as much time talking about the ups and downs of studying behaviour as we do on the actual circuits.    For links to everything we talked about, full show notes and more, head to www.onyourmind.ca  

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast:   Kat's away, and Liam is reunited with Adel Farah. Long time listeners will remember that a year ago Adel left academia for medschool, and Liam has recently decided that he will be leaving academia for.... something. We have a long chat about our motivations for leaving and what we have found, or hope to find, in the next phases of our careers.    This week Liam is bummed that he doesn't live in the States, because it means he can't sign up for Genes for Good, an academic project that periodically collects health data from you, then sends you a DNA kit and correlates genetic findings with health outcomes. If you ask them they'll also send you the results of your gene profiling, but you'll have to go elsewhere for interpretation.    Adel has been thinking about something similar, but for tumors. A recent commentary in Nature proposed a banking of genetic samples from all tumors, alongside long term patient outcome information. This could help up get a lot mo

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast: Liam and Kat talk about whether or not the current post-doc system is broken (it is) and how to fix it, then what lesson can universities learn from businesses? This week’s paper is about the long term memory requiring astrocyte expression of klingon in the fly, and leads us to discussion of the importance of considering glia in your neuronal studies.   For links to what we talked about today, full show notes, past episodes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:   We're joined by Neuroethicist Dr Veljko Dubljevic  ! He tells us what it's like to be an ethicists, and lends his perspective to our conversations about peer review and the Human Brian Project. Then we get into a paper all about the public attitudes on issues of safety, pressure, fairness, and authenticity when it comes to cognitive enhancement.  For links to everything we talked about today, full shownotes, and past episoeds head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast: Another week has gone by, and Kat and Liam are back to catch up over some science.  Liam’s got the proof of his review back from the journal and is reveling in seeing his (many) months of work in a formatted pdf.  Meanwhile, Kat’s been plugging away at processing her samples and is unreasonably enraged by a minor setback.  When she went to put her samples in an overnight incubation, she discovered that the oven was already in use, and she suddenly identified with an article that she read weeks ago, “How to P*ss off a Scientist”.  Liam’s had his own burst of frustration this week when he read the title of a press release that claimed that the differences between the autistic brain and the healthy brain have been identified “for the first time”. Venting aside, he’s concerned about the implications of misleading titles and has read an article on “scienceyness” which argues that the effects are detrimental.  Scienceyness is a take on “truthiness” that describes

This week on the on your mind neuroscience podcast:   We’re super excited to announce that we will be live-streaming the 2015 Sunposium: Neural Circuits and Sunshine, put on by the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience on Monday March 30 and Tuesday March 31!  There’s an impressive list of speakers, including Nobel Award winner Eric Betzig and in vivo memory manipulator Richard Tsien, who’s talks will be available for your viewing pleasure, live on this page.  We were able to get an interview with Dan Wilson, a graduate student at the Institute who studies synaptic dynamics in individual dendrites, which means you get a bonus weekend episode!  Of course it wouldn’t be an OYM episode if Liam and Kat didn’t talk about what’s on their minds, so we’ve got a lot of discussion going on about open sourcing the human body, the latest report to come out of the controversy over the Human Brain Project, and the possibility that neurons evolved twice! We hope you enjoy.   Get the stream and links to everything we

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast we're joined by sleep specialist Dr. Allison Brager (@beastlyvaulter). She joins us for a conversation about how to conceptualize your project as a paper, scientific vigilante justice, and how to write a WHOLE FRIGGN BOOK while doing your PhD and Post-doc (check out her book Meathead on the neuroscience of athletics). Then we get into two articles about sleep this week, looking at the relationship between energy metabolism and sleep in insomnia and acute sleep deprivation.    For past episodes, full show notes, and links to everything we talked about head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast we're joined by Maya Sapiurka (@ppyajunebug), a UCSD studnet who studies how the brain represents space, and blogs at neuWrite SD.  She joins us for conversations about the Junk DNA debate and why people find science hard to believe, and brings in an article on how to evaluate undergraduate research experiences, and this weeks feature artle describing the encoding of 3D space in bats brains. For links to everything we talked about today, full show notes and more head to www.onyourmind.ca!

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast: We welcome back founding OYMer Adel Farah! We talk about How to make science a better place for women, transcranial electronic stimulation, and The scientist Magazine. This weeks paper examines the role of gutamate and the blood brain barrier in a mouse model of Alzhimers disease.  For links to everything we talked about today, full show notes and more, head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast: Liam and Kathryn talk about the challenges of workign weekends, the implosibilty of head transplants, banning P-values, and 10 rules for better figures.  This weeks paper is about the involvment of Gomaffu, an awesomely named long noncoding RNA, in regulatoin of the nearby gene CRYBBY1 in response to fear conditioning.  For all our previous episodes, full show ntoes, and links to everything we talked about, head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast we're joined by Dr Michael Nestor of the Hussman Institue for Autism. He's got some great advice for maintaining a work/life balance while still landing a sweet PI gig. We talk about the ups and downs of PIship, and some issues with the funding structure of science. Then Liam and Kathrn discuss Natures move towards double blind peer review and the importance of talking to science journalists with care.  This weeks paper is about the networks of genes that are mutated in Autism spectrom disordres, and their possible correlation with phenotype severity (http://rdcu.be/ccYl for share access) For a full description of this weeks episode, links to everything we talked about, and our full archive of episodes head to www.onyourmind.ca/life-of-PI 

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast: Founding OYMer Adel Farrah joins us from Ireland to talk about publishing case studies, or fairry tales as he calls them, and the importance of antibody validation. Liam's publised his first review, and is happy that some physicists teamed up to prove half of them were wrong. Kathryn has computer scientists on her mind, or more accuratly Scientist Computers.  Finally we're talking about how local protein translation impacts synapse development and vice-versa in this weeks paper from eLife. For full show notes and links to everything we talked about today, head to www.onyourmind.ca

This week on the On Your mind neuroscience podcast:   Kathryn may have abandoned Liam, but she left him in the capable hands of birthday boy and returning guest Ian Mahar (@ianmahar). Ian is in one of the most exciting phases of a PhD, the endzone, where life consists of writing papers, theses, and postdoc proposals.    Back in the lab, Liam has realized that he should use his supervisor for guidance and support (sometimes called supervision)  instead of waiting to come up with solutions to every problem on his own.    While frittering away time in the lab, Liam's been catching up on some of our competition,  aka other great science and neuroscience podcasts. Check out Axons and Axioms if you're into the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy, Brain Matters for engaging interviews with experts in their field, Goggles Optional for an irreverent take on the latest science news, and You Are Not So Smart for the latest in the science of self delusion.    Ian has been getting into the pros and cons of open pe

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast: PhD student and Huntington's researcher Kimberly Girly joins us for conversations about consciousness in a coma, planning your mental health treatments with your partner, and how academic fraudster Diederik Stapel became the human garbage he is. Kim also brought us a paper using a super cool model to study how aggregates of mutant Huntington protein pass from one neuron to another.    For links to everything we've talked about in this and every other episode head to www.onyourmind.ca/Huntin-Frankenslices-Kimberly-Girling  

This week on the On Your Mind neuroscience podcast:   Kat's thinking about why some fields ahve more female PhDs than others while Liam wants to digitize his labbook. In this weeks paper somatic mutations are used to trace the liniage of single neurons in the human brain. For links to everything we talked about, full shownotes and more, head to www.oympodcast.ca/sexy-single-cells

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience podcast: We're welcoming Huy-Binh Nguyen, our new ephys expert, to the OYM studio!  He's here to chat about organizational skills, the use of consumer genetic data for profit, and the risks of neuroprofiling criminals.  Also, our paper this week uses optogenetics to provide solid evidence for the role of LTP in memory. For links to everything we talked about this week, head to www.onyourmind.ca/mind-control

Happy New Year from OYM!  This week we're talking about our science/student resolutions, the impact of modern technology on our brain and about the way we diagnose and study neuro-developmental disorders. For links to everything we talked about this week, all our other episodes, full shownotes, and more head to www.onyourmind.ca/resolutions 

Coming to you from our respective hometowns, Liam and Kat have alot on their minds to discuss before the holidays.  Instead of a typical article review, we're talking about the role of psychiatry in the recent CIA interrogation scandal, the misunderstandings that can occur when a scientific findings make it to the media, and some amazing stories of the compensatory power of the brain.

This week on the On Your Mind Neuroscience Podcast: We welcome our special guest and fellow podcaster, Nipun Chopra!  He brings discussion on the philosophy of science, what we can and should do about scientific misinterpretation, and the value of a good Charlize Theron movie; not to mention, this week’s article on the role of the REST complex in the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease

This week On Your Mind: In the spirit of the season, we’re talking about what Santa Clause might have to do with mental illness.  We’re also discussing the idea of read-only article sharing, the beauty of infographics, and the role of ERK in myelin maintenance. For links to everything we talked about, full show notes and more head to OnYourMind.ca/erkquake