Water Cooler Neuroscience Wilf Nelson

This episode is about cannabis, for decades it has been used by people to manage their mental health providing anxiety alleviating effects and supported by a range of other anecdotal evidence. With cannabis only recently being legalised across many countries in the Western world or at least approved in various forms for medicinal uses research about the effects of cannabis on mental health was light on the ground. In this episode, we are talking with Dr Carrie Cuttler about one of the first mass population studies into the effects of cannabis on people's mental health using big data and peer-reviewed statistical methods. We talk about the good, the bad and how scientists view what cannabis can do for us.

This show is sponsored by NeuroCatch Inc, an objective measure of brain health, to find out more please follow the link on our website www.watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk.

Dr. Asaf Marco is a memory expert from MIT who came on episode 9 of Think Fast. His work studies how memory formation and the genes instead our neurons can be manipulated to better understand the day to day working of human memory formation. This episode was fascinating too because his lab has used newly bred research mice with specifically created neurons that help both with fluorescence when the memory systems are 'active' and also to be super precise to the conditions Dr Marco wanted to study. The studies attached on our site watercoolerneuroscience.co.uk were gifted to the site by Dr Marco so those who want to learn more about his work can find out, for those who just want the overview please press play

In this episode, Bryan Roth is talking with our host Wilf Nelson about how serotonin and hallucinogens bind. Hallucinogens have received a lot of press recently for their uses in medicine and helping those with conditions traditionally resistant to other medical interventions but we will still don't know a lot about how they actually bind to cells. If we knew that if we had the secrets of what a hallucinogen is doing when it attaches to a neuron, or more specifically a receptor, would we need hallucinogens or could we find better and safer workarounds? On this episode of Think Fast, we talk with one of the scientists who is doing exactly that, breaking down the secrets of neurons and receptors to advance our future in both neuroscience and neuroscience medicine.

Sleep is a deep and rich topic in Psychology and Neuroscience because while it doesn't have the flashiness of 'what is consciousness' it is still a state that we occupy for around a third of lives and yet we understand very little of. In this episode we are not talking about what the neurons do but instead we are talking about the rest of the cells in the brain, the glial and specifically astroctyes, and what their role in sleep is. The glial have been called the life support system of the brain and since sleep is so restorative to our brains it would make sense that the life support system has some major roles to play in keeping our brain healthy. While this is all true our guest today is talking about how it is not only the neurons that have something to do with the brain's functioning during sleep. It is time to dive in and Think Fast.

Antje was a guest on season two of WaterCooler Neuroscience discussing her work with auditory perception and how that effects those with hearing impairment and hearing aids. In this episode we talk about how the last six months have been for her and her lab and the work that she has been doing with the Acoustical Society on the remote testing wiki to ensure quality research can continue during a global pandemic.

If you are interested in the Acoustical Society's work for your own research please check out their work through this link: https://www.spatialhearing.org/remotetesting/Issues/Issues.

In this episode of think fast we are speaking with Brigitte Lavoie who is a neuroscientist that worked on the fundamentals of antagonist muscles, when we need one muscle to contract and another to relax. Most motions our bodies does automatically keep the balance between two sets of muscles in an equilibrium thanks to a series of reflexes but walking is different and one of the main skills humans learn in our earliest years. This episode explores the research into how we walk and where we need automatic reflexes and when we need them to be overridden. This episode is particularly special because it covers science so foundational to modern brain science every neuroscientist I know had to learn this.