Mind Over Chatter

University of Cambridge
  • 4.1 (8)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • WEEKLY SERIES

Welcome to Mind Over Chatter, the Cambridge University Podcast! One series at a time, we break down complex issues into simple questions. Join Nick, James, Naomi and Annie as they ask clever people seemingly simple questions. We’ll explore climate change, the future, and much more!

See All

  1. EPISODE 1

    Obesity: the gene-environment debate

    What role do our genes play in influencing our body weight and what we like to eat? Why do some people gain weight more easily than others, and is it all down to genes or are there other factors at play? In this episode, we talked with a clinician and scientist Sadaf Farooqi, health psychologist Theresa Marteau, and geographer Thomas Burgoine about the multitude of factors that go into influencing our eating behaviours. Along the way, we hear about the crucial importance of the environment in influencing our eating behaviour, including “zoning” - the effort to keep fast food outlets no more than 400 yards from schools, and learn how our food has become more calorific over the past 20 to 30 years. Our guests discuss how ultimately, communicating information about obesity doesn’t necessarily change our behaviour towards food, as we are much more influenced by our genes and environment than what's inside our heads.  This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.  Please take our survey! How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.  Timestamps:  [00:00] - Introductions [01:00] - A bit about the guests’ research [02:10] - Defining obesity and what it means to be obese [02:45] - Along with diabetes, how does obesity impact our health? [03:45] - What proportion of the global population are obese?   [04:25] - How these [05:25] - The many factors that contribute to obesity (genes and how our genes respond to the environment)  [06:40] - Patterns of obesity. The pandemic, neighbourhoods, inequality, and how income levels affect childhood obesity?   [10:40] - How low income and poverty drains our mental capacity for cognitive tasks   [12:05] - How small amounts of income are given to the poorest households decreases stress and improves diets. [12:55] - The calorie paradox and energy-poor foods. The role of processed foods.    [14:25] - What would a ’healthy’ country/neighbourhood look like   [15:25] - Time for a recap [19:15] - What can we do at a policy level? Could hospitals be the perfect ‘role models’? [20:30] - Should policymakers be setting the food environment? Looking at examples like the experiments in Singapore.  [21:40] - Translating research to improve the food environment. Changing worksite cafeterias. Reducing the amount of higher calorie meals available. Cutting portions sizes of higher calorie meals.    [24:00] - How the size of wine glasses affects how much people are drinking. What this means in terms of calorie consumption.   [25:30] - The amount of evidence that is needed for public health interventions (public vs commercial sector) [26:40] - What about education, the school environment, zoning, access to fast food, and education around obesity [29:40] - How do we respond to risks - does information change our behaviour? Does the ‘5 A Day’ work?  [31:40] - From a psychology perspective, does education work to change our behaviour? [32:20] - What about from a biological and genetic perspective? The role of the environment.  [34:00] - Is eating behaviour voluntary? How much...

    1h 7m

  2. EPISODE 2

    Mental health and young people

    COVID-19 has disrupted the lives of everyone, including children and young people, beyond recognition. So much so, that the proportion of children aged six to 16 with probable mental health disorders has increased from one in nine in 2017 to one in six in both 2020 and 2021. In this episode, we talked with Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Tamsin Ford, Professor of Health Neuroscience Paul Fletcher and behavioural epidemiologist Dr Esther van Sluijs about growing concern over the recent and widespread deterioration of adolescent mental health and what can be done about it.  We cover everything from the prevalence of mental health problems and eating disorders, sedentary behaviour and mentally passive activities, to how mental illness is represented in video games and how video games can be used to engage the public with mental illness in the right way. Along the way, we hear about mental health before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.  Please take our survey! How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.  Timestamps:  [00:00] - Introductions [01:05] - A bit about the guests’ research [02:10] - How do we define and classify mental illness [06:40] - Seeing mental health as a spectrum with wellbeing at one end and illness at the other [09:00] - The criticism of the diagnostic process in psychiatry [11:15] - The scale of the problem. How much mental ill-health is out there? [12:10] - Concern around the fact that 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem  [13:40] - This deterioration spreads across groups, gender, and ethnicity. Children from families facing financial or food insecurity or poor parental mental health reported worse mental health.  [14:50] - The role of the pandemic and the “medicalisation” of a normal reaction to a stressful and anxious situation. [16:00] - Is it because more people are developing mental illnesses? Or is it because available services to help people have been reduced in recent years [19:00] - Time for a recap!  [25:30] - The role of sedentary behaviour, physical activity and screen-based activity and how all of this interacts with mental health [27:00] - The effect of sedentary behaviours and screen-based activities that are mentally passive.  [28:00] - The relationship between sedentary behaviour and eating behaviour [29:50] - How has the pandemic affected physicality levels?  [34:45] - The role of physical activity in mental health and wellbeing?  [35:50] -  Interventions. Treating depression through behavioural activation, which is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy.  [38:00] -  We are social animals. The active part of social media, keeping in touch and interacting with friends and family can be a good thing.  [39:00] - Videogames, including Hellblade! And the representation of mental illness in video games. Paul’s experience of working with Ninja Theory and working with creative industries.  [42:15] - Impact - the feedback from the community who played the game and the response to the representation of psychosis in the...

    1h 18m

  3. EPISODE 3

    Dementia: risks, diagnosis and prevention

    What causes dementia? And how do we diagnose and treat it? Is there anything we can do to stop ourselves from developing dementia? These are the crucial questions we’ll be exploring with clinical neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, sociologist Richard Milne, and neurologist James Rowe. In this episode, we’ll find out more about what dementia actually is, some surprising factors that increase a person’s risk of developing dementia, and computer games that can actually help detect and diagnose dementia. This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.  Please take our survey! How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.  Timestamps:  [00:00] - Introductions [01:10] - A bit about the guests’ research [02:20] - Defining dementia and what causes it [03:10] - Dementia and Alzehiemers  [03:10] - What we mean by the term neurodegenerative and tau proteins   [04:15] - How Dementia is different from normal aging   [05:15] - Who does dementia impact and the number of people in the UK who have dementia [05:45] - One in three will get dementia. One in six over the age of 80 have dementia in the UK. WHO estimates 55 million people worldwide and this figure is set to rise to 78 million by 2030.   [07:10] -The impact on families and carers. What is the cost to the economy? Trillions globally.  [08:45] - The lifespan of dementia. How the combination of our genes puts us at a higher or lower risk of dementia. How this proceeds through adult life.   [10:20] - Normal ageing vs dementia  [12:35] - Time for a recap!  [16:40] - How do we detect dementia? Declines in cognition and the importance of episodic memory.    [18:35] - CANTAB: a tool to detect early Alzheimer’s disease [20:05] - Establishing the value of early detection and early diagnosis.   [21:10] - APOE tests and the debate around if early diagnosis is useable information. Does it cause more worry and anxiety? What can be people do with the information?  [23:00] - Does this argument focus too much on the stigma associated with dementia. We should all want to know as we can do something around our own personal risk.  [24:40] - Should these risk factors simply be explained as steps that we should do anyway. Do we have to be given information about risk? [25:15] - How can we reduce our risk of dementia? Early detection also allows people more time to get some treatments and their finances together.  [27:10] - Is there a way to look for the clumps of proteins in your brain? Physical test options.  [27:40] - it is less about technology. The bigger question is about how we use the information to reduce personal risk. Diagnosis, screening and preventative interventions.  [29:30] - The possibility for behaviour change? How do we put in place systems that change behaviour. Policy and health system change.  [31:00] - The risk factors - depression, social isolation, hearing loss, cognitive inactivity, air pollution.  [31:30] - Time for another recap!  [36:40] - Dementia isn’t just a problem for people over the age of 65. 42,000...

    56 min

  4. EPISODE 4

    Antimicrobial resistance: the silent pandemic

    Is antimicrobial resistance (AMR) the greatest threat to human health? In this episode, we discuss how the misuse and overuse of antimicrobials in humans and agriculture have accelerated bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens’ ability to mutate and develop resistance against the treatments designed to curb and control them.  We talked with molecular biologist Stephen Baker, virologist Ian Goodfellow and infectious disease epidemiologist Caroline Trotter about the magnitude of the problem and how it is not a problem of the future, but of the now. Along the way, we discuss whether post COVID19, are we in a better position now to deal with the next pandemic? Can we predict when it might happen? And if it does happen, will we deal with it any differently? This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.  Please take our survey! How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.  Timestamps:  [00:00] - Introductions [01:10] - A bit about the guests’ research [02:03] - What are antimicrobials and what is antimicrobial resistance (AMR)? [03:00] - How do antimicrobials kill bacteria? How do the chemicals interact and stop a process? How were they discovered?  [04:20] - Antibiotic means anti-life. How long have they been around?  [05:10] - How does the process of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) work? [06:40] - What are the consequences of antimicrobial resistance? The example of drug-resistant typhoid [08:50] - How do you use vaccines to prevent diseases like drug-resistant typhoid? Vaccines, sanitation, and how vaccination is implemented and reformulated.  [10:15] - Is antimicrobial resistance (AMR) the greatest threat to human health? Do we underestimate the impact that antibiotics have had? [11:15] - Do we understand the scale of the resistance out there? What about mortality and morbidity because of antimicrobial resistance? [13:00] - Antimicrobial resistance-specific diseases. What about meningitis? The power of early action? [13:45] - The magnitude of the problem. The terrifying realisation that antimicrobials are irrelevant in some countries because of the sheer amount of biomass of drug resistance out there.  [15:00] - The overuse of antimicrobrials, human microbiome and the community of bacteria that live in your body.  [15:50] - Does the human microbiome recover from an antibiotic. How antibiotics work -  basically an atomic bomb going off.  [17:00] - Do we have a full picture of how important a microbiome is. Links to obesity and the long-term effects of early exposure to antibiotics.  [17:45] - What is the impact of microbiome variation on vaccines?  [19:10] - Have we misused antibiotics? Is this on us? Or is inevitable?  [19:45] - Resistance is inevitable. Resistance is reported within two years of a drug being licensed and used. We created is this arms race. This will be known as the antimicrobial era.    [21:05] - Do we need a better diagnosis before we administer antimicrobials?  [21:45] - The volume use of antimicrobials - healthcare vs agriculture.  [22:35] - The overuse of antimicrobials. gentamicin being spread on...

    1h 20m

  5. EPISODE 5

    Cancer and artificial intelligence

    What’s cancer got to do with crabs, artist Jackson Pollock, and artificial intelligence? It’s not a riddle; these are some of the things we’ll explore with surgeon Grant Stewart, computer scientist Mateja Jamnik and radiologist Evis Sala from the Mark Foundation Institute for Integrated Cancer Medicine. In this episode, we’ll discover how artificial intelligence is making it easier for doctors to diagnose and treat cancer and we’ll share some cancer facts that are both amazing and disturbing. We also learn about the WIRE clinical trial for kidney cancer. WIRE evaluates the effectiveness of giving a short course of drug treatment to patients in the one-month “window of opportunity” between diagnosis and surgery. Patients on the WIRE trial also undergo a suite of new imaging techniques that have been brought together for the first time globally in this clinical trial. This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.  Please take our survey! How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.  Timestamps:  [00:00] - Introductions [01:15] - A bit about the guests’ research [02:45] - The origins of cancer.  Why Hippocrates is known as the father of medicine.  [04:00] - How cancer starts  [05:05] - How many types of cancer are there? What are the most common types of cancer?  [06:10] - How do cancers develop? The lifecycle of cancer.  [09:00] - How early in the lifecycle can we see or detect cancer? What size does the cancer cell need to be for us to see it? [10:15] - What improved machines and AI help with detection and characterisation?  [11:00] - Can we turn imaging into a virtual biopsy? [12:20] - Defining Artificial Integiilence (AI)  [14:20] - AI and machine learning and how they interlink.  [15:10] - Deep learning and statistical learning.  [16:10] - Origins of AI in medicine and healthcare.  [17:15] - Intro to AI and cancer imagery  [18:30] - How the AI algorithm assists the radiologist [20:10] - AI and prepared models. How the data is trained to understand what cancer looks like.  [21:20] - The importance of sharing the data set.  [22:00] - Time for a recap! [28:40] - Ai and surgical robots [29:30] - AI and screening kidney cancer. Grant’s and Evis’s work using models, imagery, automation to screen for kidney cancer   [31:50] - Explaining the types of imaging in oncology   [33:10] - How Evis uses AI in her imagery  [34:10] - How to scan for ovarian cancer  [35:20] - Comparing images of tumours to paintings. Comparing Jackson to a Mark Rothko painting. Homogeneous or heterogeneous  [37:40] - Describing what the images actually look like from a non-radiologist perspective. Grades of grey. What CT scans and MRI scans look like.  [41:10] - How AI is used throughout the imagery process, not just for clarification.  [42:30] - Comparing the AI in oncology imagery to an Instagram filter. Do we lose any information when we use AI? [43:15] - Time for another recap!  [48:15] - How do we create and ensure a high quality of data in a...

    1h 9m

  6. SEASON 3 TRAILER

    Welcome to Season 3!

    Season 3 is here, and we’re back discussing all things Health!  Welcome (or welcome back) to Mind Over Chatter, the Cambridge University Podcast. One series at a time, we break down complex issues into simple questions. In this third series, we’re talking all about Health. We’ll be exploring both physical and mental health, and we’ll discuss causes, treatments and preventions for issues like dementia, cancer, infectious diseases and obesity.  We’re going to be talking to interesting people from all over the University of Cambridge, including geographers, surgeons, computer scientists, molecular microbiologists, sociologists… and many more!   We’ll cover everything from infectious diseases and how we can use vaccines to prevent them, to Tinder for bacteria; from artificial intelligence helping us tackle cancer, to Grandpa JPEG and all the Little Pixels, from adolescent mental health and eating disorders to Senua, the Pict warrior hero of the blockbuster video game Hellblade; from obesity and the gene-environment debate, to how a room full of Twixes is like a room full of Borg (resistance is futile); and from dementia and new approaches to its diagnosis and treatment, to “Tau Tangles” - the new brand of Greek noodle. Please take our survey! How did you find us? What do you like about Mind Over Chatter? We want to know. So we put together this survey https://forms.gle/r9CfHpJVUEWrxoyx9. If you could please take a few minutes to fill it out, it would be a big help.

    2 min
See All Season 3 (6)

Trailers

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About

Welcome to Mind Over Chatter, the Cambridge University Podcast! One series at a time, we break down complex issues into simple questions. Join Nick, James, Naomi and Annie as they ask clever people seemingly simple questions. We’ll explore climate change, the future, and much more!

Information

  • Creator
    University of Cambridge
  • Episodes
    20
  • Seasons
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2023 University of Cambridge
  • Show Website
    Mind Over Chatter