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 psychology research • literature, poetry, myth, fiction parallels • language, naming, reading, handwriting, gesture • perception, imagery, inner voice, hallucinations • memory, trauma, emotion, cognitive bias • music, humour, pleasure • social bonds, ageing, death, primate/bird cognitionThis podcast brings together cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and literary discussion in free-ranging conversations about how minds work and how language and art represent mental life. Across the episodes, research papers are used to illuminate everyday cognition—how we form and retrieve memories, why we persist with unhelpful problem-solving strategies, how names and concepts are accessed, and how perception can mislead us in contexts ranging from reading and face recognition to sleight-of-hand and ambiguous speech. Several strands return to the relationship between inner experience and outward reality, including inner speech, non-clinical voice hearing, imagery and aphantasia, and the ways attention, expectation, and embodiment shape what we notice and believe.
A recurring emphasis is communication as a biological and social phenomenon: laughter and self-disclosure, humour in the sounds and meanings of words, and the social dynamics that govern trust, bonding, and cultural participation. The podcast also explores how bodies and brains interact with emotion, pleasure, ageing, illness, and trauma, drawing on studies of primates and other animals as points of comparison for human development, caregiving, death, and navigation.
Each discussion is paired with poems, short stories, novels, essays, and mythic or historical texts, using literature to probe ambiguity, consciousness, identity, and moral perception—often where scientific accounts leave interpretive space. The overall result is a cross-disciplinary look at perception, memory, language, emotion, and social life, with art treated as both evidence of human experience and a tool for thinking about it.
