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 • cognition, perception, memory, language, naming • inner speech, hallucinations, emotion • music, humour, metaphor, reading, handwriting/typing • cognitive bias, problem-solving • ageing, dementia, trauma, social bonds • animal cognition (birds, primates)This podcast brings together cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and literary discussion through a recurring conversational format in which one host introduces a research paper and the other responds with a poem, story, essay, or other text. Across the episodes, the guiding interest is communication in a broad sense: how brains make meaning from words, sounds, images, bodies, and social cues, and how literature and art explore the same mechanisms through narrative, metaphor, and form.
A central theme is perception and its limits. Discussions range from how people (and other animals) interpret motion, faces, and gestures, to how expectation can mislead attention, problem-solving, and belief. The podcast repeatedly returns to the gap between experience and explanation: how ambiguous speech can be understood differently by different listeners, how inner speech and imagined voices relate to self-reflection, and how memory can be shaped by social context, questioning, and desire. Related episodes consider mental imagery, embodiment, and the ways learned skills (such as reading or writing by hand versus typing) recruit and reshape neural systems.
Language and naming are treated as both cognitive tasks and social acts, touching on why proper names can be harder to retrieve than common nouns and how words carry personal and cultural associations. The show also examines emotion and pleasure as bodily and interpersonal phenomena, including research on somatic “maps” of feeling, laughter and self-disclosure, and the neurochemistry of musical enjoyment. Alongside human studies, findings from animal behaviour—particularly primates and corvids—are used to probe attention, social bonds, navigation, and responses to loss.
The literary choices—spanning classic and contemporary fiction, poetry, myth, and essays—are used to think through topics such as ageing and dementia, trauma across generations, social class and art engagement, sexuality and gender, magic and the uncanny, and the ethical pressures of witnessing and care. The overall effect is an interdisciplinary survey of how minds perceive, remember, bond, and create meaning, tested against what stories and poems suggest about lived experience.
