The Abstract

Shahin Zagros

The Abstract: Neuroscience Unlocked What makes us human? It all comes back to the three-pound universe between your ears. Join neuroscientist and science writer Dr. Shahin Zagros as he sits down with the world’s sharpest minds in brain research to unpack the research that’s rewriting what we know about the mind. Every episode takes a brand-new, high-impact paper and distills it into four crystal-clear parts: Objective: what were they actually trying to find out?Methods: how did they look inside the black box?Results: what did they discover?Significance: why does this change everything?From memory and consciousness to epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, psychedelics, brain-machine interfaces, and beyond—The Abstract delivers the latest breakthroughs. Plus: You ask the questions. Our guests answer them directly. Whether you’re a researcher racing to keep up with the literature or just fascinated by how your brain turns chemistry into thoughts, feelings, and dreams—this is the podcast that feeds curious minds. The Abstract. Where cutting-edge neuroscience meets clarity—and curiosity gets answers.

Episodes

  1. Beyond the seizure epicentre: a network approach to temporal lobe epilepsy

    15 DEC

    Beyond the seizure epicentre: a network approach to temporal lobe epilepsy

    In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sara Larivière, Assistant Professor at the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiobiology at Université de Sherbrooke. She is at the head of the SLIC (Sherbrooke Laboratory for Integrative Connectomics), holding a Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Epilepsy. Dr. Larivière and I are friends and colleagues, having received our doctorate training at the same lab under the supervision of Dr. Boris Bernhardt, my first guest on the show. Her lab integrates neuroimaging, computational statistics, machine learning, and pipeline engineering to advance knowledge of the human brain. By developing and deploying neuroinformatics and data science tools, her team investigates normal and atypical brain development, with the goal of enhancing personalized prognosis and therapies, ultimately aiming to shape public health policy. In this instalment, Dr. Larivière and I break down a 2024 article we published in the Journal of the American Medical Association - Neurology, titled Brain Networks for Cortical Atrophy and Responsive Neurostimulation in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. We discuss how accounting for widespread cortical dynamics in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) may inform novel therapeutic approaches that move beyond traditional subcortical targets.

    45 min
  2. You don't need to be a neuroscientist to have common sense.

    30 NOV

    You don't need to be a neuroscientist to have common sense.

    I'm Shahin Zagros, cognitive neuroscientist and founder of ZAGROSCIENCE. I take brain research very seriously, which is why I find a lot of what passes for neuroscience online lacking in substance. With my podcast, The Abstract, I bring you the latest and most compelling work in the field by interviewing the women and men who are driving it forward. Don't settle for fluff or sensationalization - get the real deal by subscribing to ZAGROSCIENCE now: https://zagroscience.substack.com/subscribe

    2 min
  3. Brain function: the interplay between local specialization and global integration

    24 NOV

    Brain function: the interplay between local specialization and global integration

    In this inaugural episode, I speak with one of the world’s foremost experts in neuroimaging and brain connectomics, Dr Boris Bernhard, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroinformatics. Dr Bernhardt is the Principal Investigator at the Multimodal Imaging and Connectome Analysis (MICA) Lab situated at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute (aka, The Neuro). He is also my friend and professional colleague, having served as my thesis supervisor during my PhD studies at McGill University. His lab investigates how the organization of structural and functional brain networks supports integrated cognition in both healthy individuals and those with disorders, particularly epilepsy and autism. His team has played a key role in recent conceptual and methodological breakthroughs for mapping spatial patterns in the brain as continuous gradients—especially hierarchical ones that span from sensory-motor regions to higher-order transmodal systems responsible for associative processing. His research routinely combines multimodal neuroimaging, network neuroscience, 3D histology, and transcriptomics. On this occasion, Dr Bernhardt and I discuss a recently published paper by his lab in Nature Communications, titled Multimodal gradients unify local and global cortical organization. We break down how brain function is situated at the nexus of local and global cortical dynamics.

    42 min
  • 3 Episodes

About

The Abstract: Neuroscience Unlocked What makes us human? It all comes back to the three-pound universe between your ears. Join neuroscientist and science writer Dr. Shahin Zagros as he sits down with the world’s sharpest minds in brain research to unpack the research that’s rewriting what we know about the mind. Every episode takes a brand-new, high-impact paper and distills it into four crystal-clear parts: Objective: what were they actually trying to find out?Methods: how did they look inside the black box?Results: what did they discover?Significance: why does this change everything?From memory and consciousness to epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, psychedelics, brain-machine interfaces, and beyond—The Abstract delivers the latest breakthroughs. Plus: You ask the questions. Our guests answer them directly. Whether you’re a researcher racing to keep up with the literature or just fascinated by how your brain turns chemistry into thoughts, feelings, and dreams—this is the podcast that feeds curious minds. The Abstract. Where cutting-edge neuroscience meets clarity—and curiosity gets answers.

Information

  • Creator
    Shahin Zagros
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Shahin Zagros
  • Show Website
    The Abstract