I recently discovered The Brain Science Podcast and have been going through the archives on my iPod. Quite an intriguing mix of shows/topics/guests. Fairly layperson-accessible without being dumb or fluffy. Host Dr. Ginger Campbell is very pleasantly down to earth for the most part, and doesn't come across as smarmy.
A few of the episodes (e.g. this one where the guest sounds a little overconfident about his favored technique) I've listened to so far have had a tinge of overblown self-promotion to them, and some of the topics are a bit on the "pop science" side, but other than that I've been pretty darn impressed, both by the overall quality of the topics discussed and the overall no-frills approach of the show.
I've listened to some podcasts ostensibly related to brains and cognition and such that are just...well, let's just say that they seem to have ZERO standards for who they interview.
And while I'm all for engaging with "fringe" viewpoints (let me tell you, all those insomniac adolescent nights of listening to Coast to Coast AM were great for practicing critical thinking!), ye gads, there's only so much "and today we have an interview with Lady Rainbow Moonflower Cleopatra who is a neo-shamanistic dreamwork holistic crystal therapist who discovered through the power of Dynamic Positive Imaging that she is actually the quantum reincarnation of Pikachu!" I can take.
Too much of that sort of thing and my brain starts to feel like I've eaten nothing but candy corn and Pop-Tarts for the past week. Whereas a steady diet of information and discussion from people who, you know, actually care about finding out stuff about actual reality is much more satisfying.
In any case, key things I've appreciated about the Brain Science Podcast include: an emphasis on embodiment as being a critical aspect of cognition (very refreshing!), interviews with people doing actual research (like one scientist who has spent 35 years just studying one aspect of the lobster brain!), and a reasonably straightforward format.
2 comments:
> [K]ey things I've appreciated about
> the Brain Science Podcast include. . .
> interviews with people doing actual
> research (like one scientist who has
> spent 35 years just studying one
> aspect of the lobster brain!). . .
There's another Web site called Talking Robots
http://lis.epfl.ch/resources/podcast/
(linked to from the Brain Science Podcast), which contains an interview with Inman Harvey
http://lis.epfl.ch/resources/podcast/2008/02/inman-harvey.html
who mentions, during the interview, the fact that we now know a lot about the nematode worm (Caenorhabditis elegans) -- how many cells there are, how they're connected to each other, and the detailed lineage of each one during embryogenesis as the adult organism develops from a fertilized egg. He estimates that sometime during the next thousand years, we might be able to simulate a nematode worm.
He also has a paper on the Web called "Robotics: Philosophy of Mind using a Screwdriver",
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/inmanh/
screwdriver.pdf
in which he states "Cognitive science seems one of the last bastions to hold out against a Copernican, relativist revolution. In this paper I will broadly distinguish between the pre-Copernican views associated with the computationalist approach of classical Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), and the contextual, situated approaches of nouvelle AI."
Oh dear, what a party pooper! (I love the phrase "nouvelle AI", though.)
JimF: The "Talking Robots" podcast is now defunct under that name; the people who produced it are now producing a podcast simply called Robots, which seems to be every bit as good so far. But I hadn't seen the nematode article you referred to yet, so thank you for referring me to it.
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