#40: Explaining Brains with Alie and Micah Caldwell

06/21/21 • 53 min

Alie and Micah Caldwell produce the YouTube channel, Neuro Transmissions. Their videos present the basics of neuroscience and psychology in an accessible, engaging way. Alie is a neuroscientist and senior science writer at the University of Chicago Medicine. Micah is a licensed professional clinical counselor. In our conversation, we talk about the origins of Neuro Transmissions, their philosophy of science communication, and their new book.

Check your local bookstores for their upcoming book: Brains Explained: How They Work and Why They Work That Way .

Some science communication resources that came up in our conversation:

ComSciCon: A free science communication workshop for graduate students
Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science
COMPASS Science Communication Trainings
Alan Alda’s book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
The Union of Concerned Scientists

Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/neuro-transmissions-with-alie-&-micah-caldwell/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Check your local bookstores for their upcoming book: Brains Explained: How They Work and Why They Work That Way .

Some science communication resources that came up in our conversation:

ComSciCon: A free science communication workshop for graduate students
Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science
COMPASS Science Communication Trainings
Alan Alda’s book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
The Union of Concerned Scientists

Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."

Previous Episode

#39: Social Media Polarization with Chris Bail

Chris Bail is a computational social scientist. He wrangles the data that our social interactions leave behind to better understand how ideas spread. He is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University, where he directs the Polarization Lab. A Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellow, he studies political extremism on social media using tools from the emerging field of computational social science.

He is the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing.

Things we mention in this episode:

Internet bots for good and evil
@simscreens: A Twitter bot tweeting out frames from The Simpsons
Using Twitter bots to understand polarization (Bail et al., 2018)
Many people just don’t care about politics (check out my interview with Nathan Kalmoe)
Dr. Bail’s earlier work on how anti-Muslim sentiment spreads (Bail, 2016)
Tools developed by the Polarization Lab to fight back against polarization

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Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/social-media-polarization-with-chris-bail/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Next Episode

#41: Taking Social Science into the World with Neil Lewis Jr.

Neil Lewis Jr. doesn’t just study social questions—he studies them in the places where they matter. He’s an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, and he’s interested in social inequities, how they work, and how we can address them. In addition to his own research, he also consults for organizations and contributes to FiveThirtyEight. He was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science in 2019 and won the SAGE Young Scholar award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2020.

In our conversation, Neil shares his research on health communication and education disparities, talks about what it takes to collaborate outside of academic institutions, and how he approaches science communication.

Things we mention in this episode:

In my introduction to this episode, I pull from a variety of sources to highlight the value of applied psychological research. These include the research by the Research Branch, Information and Education Division of the War Department, a history of social psychology (Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2011), Kurt Lewin’s research on eating organ meats (Lewin, 1943), reflections on social psychology’s “fun and games” (Ring, 1967), references to social psychology’s “crisis of confidence” (Elms, 1975), and Katz’s reflection on the value of basic and applied social research (Katz, 1951).
Field study of health messages in a physician waiting room (Lewis et al., 2020) and the laboratory research it was based on (Albarracin et al., 2007)
Neil brings up a controversial paper suggesting that social psychology isn’t a science—instead, it’s a study of history (Gergen, 1973)

The opening of the episode features audio from the World War II film, Why We Fight: Prelude to War, produced by the U.S. Office of War Information (1942).
Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."

For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/taking-social-science-into-the-world-with-neil-lewis-jr/
Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Opinion Science - #40: Explaining Brains with Alie and Micah Caldwell

Transcript

Andy Luttrell:

I love doing this podcast. Being able to bring insights from psychology, political science, and communication to anyone who’s interested is an amazing privilege. The seed of it started back in 2015. As a graduate student, I started making fun little videos, explaining findings from social psychology, and putting them up on YouTube. Some of those videos took off and so I made some more. I put together video courses about psychology and it all led to this