Neuroscience + Dance with Devika Nair

Explicit content warning

09/14/21 • 69 min

Devika Nair (she/her) manages a large translational brain tumor project at UCSF. Their goal is to better predict tumor transformation to higher grades and differentiate between tumor and treatment effects in primary gliomas using advanced MR imaging techniques. Outside of research, she helps direct a science podcast group called Carry the One Radio whose mission is to ignite scientific curiosity. She also takes classes in and performs Indian classical dance, which has informed her understanding of her field of study—neuroscience.

As a clinical researcher, she finds herself operating between brilliant colleagues with specialized training in high-level physics who run the MRI machines at a tumor research facility and the clinicians who make important decisions based on the lab’s findings. One day, though, an unexpected health scare took her out from behind the glass to inside of the very MRI machines she asks patients to enter every day. Suddenly, what was simply a professional passion—using story to communicate science to the general public—became a personal mission. She wasn’t sure how to explain the way MRIs work that might actually be interesting to other people, until she realized that the movement of hydrogen protons, which is how images wind up on film, look just like the movements of the Indian classical dance she learned as a child.

In this episode, Devika and Brandi talk about the intersections of Neuroscience + Dance, including:

The amazing story of how we met.
Her health scare and how she applied her research skills to lend herself a sense of control in the midst of a scary situation.
Growing up with an artistic mom that inspired her early dance training and who continues to teach today.
And, her fascination for what art and science have in common, and how they can be used to encourage curiosity and seeing different perspectives outside of your own.

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Sign up for the newsletter.Check out this episode's show notes.
Follow along on Twitter: @thisplusthatpod
Follow along on Instagram: @thisplusthatpod
Check out the Website: thisplusthat.com

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

In this episode, Devika and Brandi talk about the intersections of Neuroscience + Dance, including:

The amazing story of how we met.
Her health scare and how she applied her research skills to lend herself a sense of control in the midst of a scary situation.
Growing up with an artistic mom that inspired her early dance training and who continues to teach today.
And, her fascination for what art and science have in common, and how they can be used to encourage curiosity and seeing different perspectives outside of your own.

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Previous Episode

Environment + Genre with Shannon Davies Mancus

Shannon Davies Mancus’s (she/her) undergraduate and first degree was in musical theatre, and she has maintained a performance praxis through her second career as an academic. She is currently an Associate Teaching Professor and coordinator of the Nature and Human Values program at the Colorado School of Mines. Her work can be found in publications such as Performing Ethos, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-first Century Feminist Theory. Her work focuses on the political performativity of environmentalist media in visual and popular culture. She loves traveling, community, and sharing exciting ideas.

Her obsession with pop culture runs deep, but mostly focuses influences the narratives that tell us there’s only one “right” way to be an environmentalist, and how we can move beyond that script to reach new and better stories. Not just so we can “appear” a new way, but so that we might actually relate to one other more and begin to truly shift our environmental future.

That’s part of what she and Brandi talk about on this official first interview episode of the show, on the intersections of Environment + Genre, plus:

What scripts and genres have to do with the media we consume and how we behave in the world.
The power of stories and something called “the information deficit model,” an idea from science communication.
Shanon’s story of living through 9/11 and the film that helped her see movies as a form of artwork that can create a public sphere for difficult dialogue.
Why she loves studying popular imagination around witches and how they connect to our sense of environmental doom.
How she’s weaved together all of the seemingly disparate things in her career into where she is now, but how that only became clear in hindsight.
And, why she loves teaching unexpected things to math and engineering students.

Listeners can find Shannon Davies Mancus on Twitter @shannonmancus and on Instagram @shannonmancus.

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital

Next Episode

Trauma + Curiosity with Tyler Thrasher

Tyler Thrasher (he/him) is an artist, scientist, and plant lover. With an undying love for nature and its respective curiosities, there are few things his brain isn’t obsessing over. Between his pursuits to crystallize the world, opalize everything, and hunt down some of the realm’s most unique plants, his passion to combine art and science every step of the way is his fire and fuel. Chances are, if you catch Tyler at a party, he’ll talk your ear off about exploring caves, growing minerals in his lab, playing Dungeons and Dragons, hybridizing new plants, electronic music, grappling with and overcoming trauma, and just how amazingly beautiful and mysterious this whole wide universe is. When he's not spending time crystallizing insects, you can find him in the greenhouse hybridizing plants, cultivating mutations, or screaming into the existential void.

But behind all of his online plant rants, dressing up like monster, and pretending to be a fern on social media, Tyler Thrasher has been through more than his fair share of pain. After a childhood of abuse and the sudden and shocking fire that destroyed Tyler and his wife Molly’s home a few years ago, you’d think Tyler might have given up on the inherent goodness of existence. But a wild outpouring of generosity that helped his family survive tragedy turned his perspective completely around.

In this episode, Tyler and Brandi talk about the intersections of Trauma + Curiosity, including:

How art and curiosity and sleeping in a greenhouse as a child was whimsical, but more often served as an escape from trauma Tyler was facing at home.
How going through trauma doesn’t mean you’ll never heal.
How Tyler sees his work as a dance back and forth with the universe—which is really just himself—where he gives a little and then the universe gives a little.
How systems teach us racism and all of the micro aggressions that feed into Tyler’s desire to give and support Black causes.
Not needing a degree to do science or call yourself a scientist.
Social anxiety, mental health, and how to cope.
Jealousy and scarcity in the art world.
Being exactly who you are and taking up space because there will always be people who hate what you do.

Listeners can find Tyler Thrasher at his website, https://tylerthrasher.com/ and on Instagram @tylerthrasherart.

Get more This Plus That:
Sign up for the newsletter and get MORE Tyler—a bonus 13-minute chat Tyler and Brandi had on the intersections of Plants + Capitalism.Check out this episode's show notes.
Follow along on Twitter: @thisplusthatpod
Follow along on Instagram: @thisplusthatpod
Check out the Website: thisplusthat.com

Music: The in-house musicians at Slip.stream
Audio Engineering: The team at Upfire Digital