Site • RSS • Apple PodcastsDescription (podcaster-provided):
Welcome to The Neuromantics – a monthly podcast for writers, psychologists, neuroscientists, poets, philosophers, comedians, musicians, and anyone interested in the exchange of ideas. The idea: a free-ranging conversation between Professor Sophie Scott (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/icn/people/sophie-scott and @sophiescott) of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and Will Eaves about the brain, the mind, language, gesture, and communication as a fundamental property of science, literature and the arts. The format: roughly 30 mins of chat with musical stings in the punning style of the podcast title by Michael Caines. Sophie shares a bit of research. Will brings along a poem, story, speech, or essay. There will be guests in the future. There will be events.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ neuroscience-and-literature conversations • perception, attention, cognitive bias • language, naming, reading, memory, inner speech • emotion, humour, music reward • ageing, dementia, trauma • social bonds, sexuality, embodiment, animal cognitionThis podcast brings cognitive neuroscience and psychology into conversation with literature and the arts through free-ranging discussions that pair a research paper with a poem, short story, novel excerpt, essay, or other literary text. Across the episodes, scientific findings about perception, learning, memory, language, emotion, and social behaviour are used as a springboard for thinking about how people make sense of experience, and how writers and artists represent that sense-making in narrative, metaphor, sound, and image.
A recurring focus is how the brain’s expectations shape what we notice and what we miss. The show looks at cognitive biases in problem solving, the ways attention can be directed or misdirected (including in contexts like stage magic), and how perception can be sharpened or altered—through degraded speech, inner voices, mental imagery, or the acquisition of skills such as reading. Several conversations examine the boundaries between internal experience and external reality, including inner speech, non-clinical voice-hearing, imaginary companions, and the social conditions that influence whether unusual experiences are treated as insight, creativity, or symptom.
Language and communication are central themes, explored through topics such as naming and word retrieval, the relationship between sound and meaning (including what makes certain words seem humorous), and the role of gesture and embodiment in cognition. Music and vocal expression also appear as case studies for embodied experience, pleasure, and social bonding, connecting acoustic properties (pitch and timbre) to reward systems and to the communicative functions of performance.
The podcast frequently broadens out to social and developmental questions: how bonds and caregiving affect survival and wellbeing (in humans and other primates), how trauma and grief can ripple across generations, how cultural engagement relates to mental health, and how ageing and neurodegeneration intersect with identity and cognition. Throughout, literary works are treated as thought experiments and observations about mind and society, offering alternative angles on evidence, interpretation, and what it feels like to perceive, remember, desire, and change.
