The Academic Minute

Academic Minute

Astronomy to Zoology www.academicminute.org

  1. 9 hr ago

    Aron Barbey, University of Notre Dame - Intelligence Emerges When the Whole Brain Works As One

    We are redefining our view of human intelligence. Aron Barbey, the Andrew J. McKenna Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, looks at how our brain organizes information to do so. Faculty Bio: Aron Barbey is also the director of the University of Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center and the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory.Barbey’s research investigates how intelligence emerges from the network organization and dynamics of the human connectome, applying methods from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology and computer science. His work aims to achieve a deeper understanding of the neural foundations of intelligence and to enable scientific innovation in cognitive enhancement, neurorehabilitation and biologically inspired artificial intelligence.Over the course of his career, Barbey’s research group has won more than $26 million in research funding, with support from organizations including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, the White House BRAIN Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and private industry sponsors such as Abbott Nutrition, Google Brain and PepsiCo. Transcript: General intelligence is our ability to solve problems across many areas of life, helping us go beyond what we’ve experienced, make sense of the unfamiliar, and adapt to new challenges. What’s remarkable is not just this capacity, but its source: a finite, fragile system, the human brain, a three-pound organ powered by less energy than a lightbulb. The question is how the brain’s finite architecture makes such flexible intelligence possible. The answer may lie in how knowledge is organized in the brain. Rather than stored in one location, information is distributed across regions. The brain coordinates activity across these regions to construct mental models of the world. These models are built from reusable components of knowledge — information about people, objects, actions and events. Because these components can be combined in different ways across contexts, the brain can generate a variety of thoughts from a finite set of building blocks. But if knowledge is distributed and its components can be recombined in many ways, what determines which combinations are possible? The answer may lie in the network of connections linking brain regions. Like a city’s map, this network defines the possible routes of communication between different parts of the brain. Some regions communicate easily through direct connections, while others are more difficult to link. The brain’s flexibility arises from its physical wiring. This redefines how we understand human intelligence. The brain does not simply process thoughts, it gives them their structure. By shaping which ideas can be linked, how easily they can be reached, and how efficiently they can be recombined, it makes general intelligence possible in a finite system. Intelligence, therefore, is the ability to move through a landscape of ideas whose terrain determines what can be even thought at all. Read More: [Notre Dame News] - Key to human intelligence lies in how brain networks work together Decision Neuroscience Lab This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  2. 1 day ago

    Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, New York University - Putting a Number on Bilingual Experience

    Putting a figure on a person’s bilingual experience can be daunting. Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, assistant professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, looks into one way to do so. Faculty Bio: I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. In my research, I combine insights from monolingual and multilingual individuals, who process language through speech or sign, to inform an inclusive and comprehensive neurobiology of language. My research combines data from neuroimaging, computational and behavioral methods with theoretical insights from linguistics, psychology and neuroscience.I obtained my PhD from New York University, where I worked at the Neuroscience of Language lab under Liina Pylkkänen’s supervision and completed my post-doctoral training at Harvard University, working in the Cognitive Neuropsychology lab under Alfonso Caramazza’s supervision. In 2019, I was recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 scientist, and in 2025, I received the Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language. Transcript: For decades, bilingualism researchers have faced a deceptively simple question: how do we actually measure how bilingual someone is?We often collect rich language histories, but when it comes time to analyze the data, there’s no standard way to turn all that information into a single, interpretable number. As a result, different studies define “language dominance” and “degree of bilingualism” in very different ways, making it hard to compare results across labs and populations.In my research with my collaborator Jessica Chen, we set out to develop a simple, theoretically grounded way to quantify two things: how dominant someone is in one language versus another, and where they fall on the continuum from monolingual to highly multilingual.We built our approach around two variables that decades of work show are fundamental: self-rated proficiency and age of acquisition. Age of acquisition matters because the brain’s capacity for language learning changes over development, and later exposure typically limits ultimate attainment. Proficiency matters because it reflects how well the language is actually represented and used.We combined these factors into a formula that produces a continuous dominance score, ranging from perfectly balanced bilinguals to strongly dominant speakers of one language. We also introduced a multilingualism score that places individuals on a spectrum from monolingual to polyglot, while giving diminishing weight to each additional language, reflecting the fact that the jump from one to two languages is larger than from four to five.We validated these measures in large datasets, including both healthy adults and bilingual individuals with aphasia, and showed that our simple formulas closely match much more complex statistical methods.Our goal is to offer the field a transparent, biologically informed, and easily reproducible way to characterize language experience—so that when we talk about bilingualism, we’re finally speaking the same quantitative language. Read More: [NYU] - Neuroscientists Devise Formulas to Measure Multilingualism This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  3. 4 days ago

    Mariah Purol, Union College - What Happens to Our Love Lives When the Rest of Life Gets Messy

    On Union College Week: What happens to our love lives when the rest of life gets messy? Mariah Purol, assistant professor of psychology, examines this. Faculty Bio: Mariah received her PhD in Social & Personality Psychology from Michigan State University in 2024. She is currently a faculty member in the Psychology department of Union College. Her work examines how both individuals’ and their partners’ characteristics influence their relationship satisfaction, life satisfaction, and well-being. To that end, she’s interested in how we create happy, satisfying lives as individuals (studying traits like gratitude and optimism), and as relationship members (studying constructs like interpersonal perceptions and personality in romantic relationships/friendships). Transcript: We have lots of ideas about how life events, especially negative ones, might impact our romantic relationships. For example, what happens to a couple when one of them gets diagnosed with a chronic health condition? Has a parent pass away? Loses a child? Does relationship quality degrade in the face of these stressors, or do couples draw closer?In a recent project, I examined the relationship trajectories of over 10,000 couples in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Switzerland. I did this by combining data from three longitudinal datasets, each of which had information about couples’ relationship quality—like their satisfaction, their levels of support, or their closeness— and the life events that they experienced together. With this data, I examined how changes in relationship quality may be associated with the occurrence of these life events. Overall, it was extremely rare for negative life events to predict negative relationship outcomes (like decreased satisfaction). In a handful of cases, experiencing negative life events was associated with positive relationship outcomes. For example, individuals who experienced a potentially stressful life transition, like beginning a new job or experiencing a new negative health event, also reported feeling more support and responsiveness from their partner over time. However, these effects were rare, and, when significant, the size of the effects were very small. It was much more common for the occurrence of these life events to be unassociated with changes in relationship quality. While this may seem surprising, these results emphasize a point relationships theorists have been making for decades: the presence of a negative event alone is not enough to make or break a romantic relationship. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  4. 5 days ago

    Stephen Schmidt, Union College - Making A [Tax] Effort for Black Students' Education

    On Union College Week: What can we do to improve education for Black students in majority white communities? Stephen Schmidt, Kenneth B. Sharpe Professor of Economics, examines possible solutions. Faculty Bio: Stephen Schmidt has been professor of economics at Union College since 1994, after completing his Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University. He was appointed the Kenneth B. Sharpe Professor of Economics in September 2019. His research interests include the economics of education, especially education finance, and the normative evaluation of economic outcomes and policies. He has published articles in American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings), Journal of Public Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Higher Education, Theoria, Restoration Ecology, Journal of Economic Education, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Southern Economic Journal, International Journal of Industrial Organization, and others. He teaches courses in econometrics, game theory, intermediate microeconomics, the economics of race, and normative economics, as well as the College’s first-year inquiry seminar. Transcript: There is a racial divide in the United States economy, which means that people of different racial and ethnic identities don’t have the same economic prospects in life. One source of this divide is differences in education. Students of color, especially African-Americans, often don’t get the same level of education funding that other students get. One explanation for this pattern is stigmatization theory. It says that when members of a majority stigmatize a minority, they spend less on public services, since the stigmatized group cannot be excluded from the benefits of those services. My research examines the way school districts set spending levels to see if the patterns that stigmatization theory predicts are found in the data. In particular, I look to see whether the racial composition of a district’s student body affects spending levels differently when the adult voters in the district are dominantly White. There is good news, which is that in districts where the adult voters are less than about 90% White, education funding is higher when the student body contains more African-American or Hispanic students - presumably to address disadvantages children in those communities face. But, in districts with more than about 90% White voters, this effect is found only for Hispanic students, not for African-American students. Why are only African-American students, not Hispanic students, treated differently when districts have highly White voters? Stigmatization can explain this pattern. If White voters stigmatize African-American children - but not Hispanic children – and they can only act on this stigmatization when they are dominant in education politics, then we would see the pattern that we actually see in the data. What should we do? We can redraw district lines in ways that increase the diversity of voters, not just students, where that is possible. When it isn’t possible, state governments could provide funding that local voters are reluctant to provide. Racial Stratification and Local Education Funding This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  5. 6 days ago

    Holli Frey, Union College -Tick, Tick… Boom! Unraveling the Secrets of Caribbean Volcanoes

    On Union College Week: How do we unravel the secrets of volcanoes? Holli Frey, professor of geosciences, examines tiny crystals to gather clues. Faculty Bio: Holli Frey is a professor of Geosciences from Union College (NY). She studies volcanoes, trying to understand the plumbing systems beneath them, looking for clues as to how and why they erupt. She is particularly interested in mineral chemistry and chronology and uses a variety of analytical tools to address fundamental questions about magma evolution. She has active field-based projects in the Caribbean (St. Vincent and Dominica) and Central Oregon (Tumalo Tuff) and previously did work in the western Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt and plutons in coastal Maine. She enjoys mentoring students, who are frequently co-authors on her publications. Her most recent work is on the eruptions of St. Vincent and she is a project partner of Dr. Jenni Barclay (University of Bristol) on a funded, collaborative grant, “Ex-X: Expecting the Unexpected (Understanding Dangerous Volcanic Transitions)”. This summer, Dr. Frey will take several students to Dominica, continuing to explore the eruptive history of the island. Dr. Frey received her B.A. in geology from Franklin and Marshall College and her PhD in geosciences from University of Michigan, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Transcript: In early 2021, the volcano La Soufrière in St. Vincent in the Caribbean rumbled to life after more than 40 years. Thick lava slowly oozed out at the summit, not a real threat to the 16,000 people living in its shadow.Then, in April, everything changed. The shaking beneath the volcano shifted, prompting an evacuation. In less than 24 hours, powerful explosions began, sending ash high into the atmosphere. For two weeks, more than 30 explosions rocked the island, transforming the landscape and destroying more than 1000 homes.So, what happened inside the volcano during that sudden transition?To find out, we turned to the crystals locked inside the rocks that erupted in the first 48 hours. It was the smallest crystals – called microlites – that were key to understanding the volcano’s behavior. The microlites are like time capsules; they preserve clues about where magma has been and what it experienced on its journey to the surface. As these tiny crystals formed, they caused the magma to become more gas rich, increasing the pressure past a tipping point which caused the explosions.What we found in the microlite chemistry tells a story of magma moving through two very different environments on its way to the surface.The first crystals formed deep underground, more than fifteen kilometers beneath the volcano, where magma sat under intense pressure and water-rich conditions. Those crystals were carried upward, survivors from deep in the volcanic plumbing system.The next series of microlites didn’t come from depth however. They crystallized as the magma was moving more quickly to the surface, after the initial throat clearing first blasts that destroyed the lava dome.By reading the record preserved in the tiny crystals, we can better understand how quiet dome-building eruptions suddenly become explosive and hopefully improve how we anticipate hazards at active volcanoes. Read More: [Lyell Collection] - Petrology of the explosive deposits from the April 2021 eruption of La Soufrière volcano, St Vincent: a time-series analysis of microlites [Union] - Frey Awarded NSF RAPID Grant [U.S. National Science Foundation] - Award Abstract # 2132566 RAPID: The effusive to explosive transition of La Soufrière, St. Vincent: Insights from petrology and hygrometry DangerousVolcanoes.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  6. 21 Jul

    Guillermina Seri, Union College - Democracy, Markets, Rights, and Emergency Rule

    On Union College Week: Why are democracies suspending the rights of their people? Guillermina Seri, professor of political science, explores this. Faculty Bio: Guillermina Seri is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Union College, NY, where she teaches courses in political theory and Latin American Politics. Seri is the author of the books Seguridad: Crime, Police Power, and Democracy in Argentina (Continuum, 2012) and Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance. The Crisis of Democratic Rights (University of Michigan Press, 2026), and co-editor of the volume Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies (Palgrave, 2018). Transcript: We often assume democracies are safe havens for human rights, but my research tracks a troubling trend: Across a number of democracies, state abuses and police violence are starting to mirror the abuses linked to emergency measures that suspend rights in authoritarian regimes.Drawing on media and archival research, I’ve found that while emergency powers used to be the tool of dictators in the 1970s, by the mid-2000s, democratic governments were actually using them more often than nondemocracies. These records challenge established beliefs in political science that democracies “almost never” suspend rights.Why is this happening? One trend associated with the rise of emergency regimes is the subordination of politics to protecting markets. We’ve entered an era where protecting the market has become the state's highest priority—its Reason of State—often bypassing legal safeguards. This global experiment began under the military dictatorship of 1970s Chile, then extended through and from the Global North. Today, it thrives in the “chainsaw” economics of Javier Milei's Argentina by subjecting everyone and everything to a market rationale, even when it may undermine rights protections.However, my research also highlights the democratic extraordinary moments when citizens reclaim voice and rights. These are the moments that open possibilities to strengthen democracy and take care of both people and the planet. Read More: [University of Michigan Press] - Neoliberalism and Unlawful Governance This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  7. 20 Jul

    Kristin Bidoshi, Union College - What Does it Mean to Teach Language During War?

    On Union College Week: Learning goes on, even during war. Kristin Bidoshi, professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, discusses this through language teaching in Ukraine. Faculty Bio: Kristin Bidoshi is a professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the director of Russian and East European Studies program at Union College, a small liberal arts college in Schenectady, NY. She conducts fieldwork in Eastern Europe and publishes on topics including the use of oral tradition in the works of Anton Chekov, Nikolai Gogol and Liudimila Petrushevskaia. She also publishes in applied linguistics, specifically in Russian language pedagogy, and has recently presented workshops on building, evaluating and using custom AI tools in the language classroom. Kristin also directs a Teaching English Practicum in which Union College students teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes online to Ukrainian children or in-person ESL classes to refugees and immigrants in the NY Capital District. Transcript: What does it mean to teach language during war? The answer seems obvious. Language instruction can resume remotely, focusing on basic communicative skills. But this captures only part of the problem. War-time language teaching is never pedagogically neutral. Instruction unfolds within asymmetries of vulnerability and responsibility as classrooms become places where global politics and ethical judgment emerge. My research, grounded in applied linguistics, examines foreign language education during war. Drawing on Michael Byram’s theory of intercultural citizenship, qualitative data from student teachers’ reflections and classroom observations of their remote English classes with Ukrainian children, this research examines how wartime English instruction moves beyond its expected focus on grammar and communication to become an ethical and civic practice, reshaping everyday instructional approaches, classroom roles and even student teachers’ understandings of language teaching, power and civic responsibility. A student’s apology for missing class because “the power was out,” is a stark reminder of how the war shapes daily life. When a student mentions life “before the war,” grammar becomes less important as the teacher decides how to preserve instructional routine and acknowledge hardship. In these moments, skill instruction gives way to responding with care to lives shaped by conflict. In times of war, education is fragile. This research reminds us that language pedagogy, theorized through intercultural citizenship, can sustain human connection when war seeks to undo it. Read More: [Space of Knowledge] - English speaking club with American students This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  8. 17 Jul

    Carrie Cutler, Washington State University - From Future Tasks to Past Events Cannabis Intoxication Disrupts Memory in Many Ways

    Cannabis may affect your memory after use, but to what extent? Carrie Cuttler, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cannabis Research Center at Washington State University, investigates this. Faculty Bio: Dr. Carrie Cuttler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Cannabis Research Center at Washington State University. She directs the Health and Cognition (THC) Lab, where her research examines both the beneficial and detrimental effects of cannabis and cannabinoids. Her recent work focuses on the therapeutic potential of cannabigerol (CBG) and the effects of chronic cannabis use and acute cannabis intoxication on cognition (e.g., memory, creativity, executive functioning), mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism, ADHD), physical health (e.g., pain, sleep), and stress. Dr. Cuttler has published several books and more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles. Transcript: One of the most well-documented effects of acute cannabis intoxication is impairment in memory. However, memory is not a single process—it is a complex system composed of multiple subsystems that rely on different neural mechanisms. Despite this complexity, most previous research on cannabis has focused on a narrow set of memory tests, particularly verbal memory tests and working memory tests. Far fewer studies have examined how cannabis affects other types of memory that are more relevant to everyday functioning. These include temporal order memory, prospective memory, source memory, false memory, and autobiographical memory. To address this gap, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in which 120 participants with substantial experience using cannabis, vaporized either placebo, a moderate dose, or a high dose of cannabis. We observed significant detriments across several domains, including verbal memory, visuospatial memory, working memory, prospective memory, source memory, false memory, and temporal order memory. To our knowledge, this is the first study to detect significant detrimental effects of acute cannabis intoxication on prospective memory and temporal order memory. We did not observe significant effects on short-term memory or autobiographical memory. However, this is the first study to examine autobiographical memory following acute cannabis intoxication. Future research using more complex autobiographical memory tasks that capture real-world experiences is needed to corroborate this finding. It is important to note that participants were mostly young adults frequently using cannabis recreationally. Effects would likely be stronger in less experienced cannabis users and findings may not generalize to older adults or medical users. Read More: [Sage Journals] - Mapping the acute effects of cannabis on multiple memory domains: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

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