The Nature & Nurture Podcast

Dr. Michael Bernstein is an experimental psychologist, Assistant Professor at Brown University Medical School, and the author of The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick. Dr. Bernstein’s research is focused on the overlap between cognitive science and medicine, studying the role of expectation in healthcare and leveraging the placebo effect to improve patient outcomes.  In this episode, we explore the mechanisms, implications, and ethical dilemmas of the placebo and nocebo effects in healthcare. Dr. Bernstein explains that the nocebo effect is essentially the opposite of the placebo effect, where negative expectations can lead to worsening symptoms. He shares examples from randomized trials and addresses ethical challenges in medical disclosure. We also discuss the impact of patient expectancy, anxiety, and media influence on symptom manifestation, along with considerations for future research and practical applications in medicine. 00:27 Understanding the Nocebo Effect 02:11 Ethical Dilemmas in Medical Disclosure 04:38 The WebMD Effect and Media Influence 08:20 Psychological Mechanisms of Nocebo and Placebo 17:28 Conditioning and Expectation in Healthcare 18:34 Evolutionary Perspectives on Placebo 23:16 Trust, Authority, and the Placebo Effect 29:04 Understanding Negativity Bias in Behavioral Economics 29:46 Environmental Factors and Nocebo Effects 31:54 Recency Bias in Medical Procedures 33:47 The Role of Cognitive Biases in Healthcare 35:46 The Placebo Effect in Surgeries 43:24 AI in Medicine: Ethical Considerations and Future Directions 51:52 Open Label Placebos and Pain Management 53:44 The Importance of Ritual in Healing 55:30 Exploring Placebo Effects in Animals

Dr. Bailey is a psychologist, behavioral geneticist, and Professor at Northwestern University specializing in the etiology of sexual orientation, sexual preferences and paraphilias, and gender diversity. In this episode, we discuss the history of transexualism in clinical psychology and its relation to modern transgender identifying people, the science and ethics of gender affirming care in adults and children, and the different manifestations of gender dysphoria across children, men, women, and comorbidity with autogynephilia. We also discuss the heritability of sexual orientation, the role of prenatal hormones in determining sexual orientation, gender identity, and psychological gender differences, and arousal patterns. Lastly, we discuss the politics of sexology as a field, and how to conduct effective and impartial research on politically charged topics such as researching gender dysphoria, its causes, and evidence bases.

Dr. Ogi Ogas is a mathematical neuroscientist and author several books including Consciousness: How It’s Made, and A Billion Wicked Thoughts. He writes about autism, mathematical neuroscience, consciousness, and more on his Dark Gift blog: https://www.ogiogas.com/  In this episode Ogi and I discuss the history of mathematical neuroscience, competing computational views of consciousness and why Ogi favors dynamical theories over statistical and deterministic theories of mind, how consciousness evolved, and how human consciousness differs from other species. We also discuss human sexuality and his book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, reflecting on sex differences in online sexual behavior and media consumption. Lastly, we discuss the neuroscience of autism, the subjective experience of autism, its diagnostic history, and how a mathematical and biological account can improve clinical psychology.

Dr. Holly Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Southern Methodist University.             Dr. Bowen’s research focuses on how affective states, specifically emotion and motivation, influence how we form memories and remember past experiences. She is also interested in how the links between emotion, motivation and memory are impacted by age-related cognitive changes, using multiple methods including behavioral paradigms, computational modeling, and neuroimaging with event-related potentials (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this episode Holly and I discuss emotion and motivation’s impact on memory encoding and consolidation, the differences between emotional valence verses arousal and their neurophysiology, and their connections to the reward system, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. We talk about dual-systems models of reward processing, cognitive control, and decision-making, the role of dopamine in facilitating learning and memory, the role of norepinephrine and cortisol in threat processing and fear conditioning, and paradoxes in how brain activity and behavior changes with age. Lastly, we discuss the negativity bias in memory, the positivity bias in nostalgia, and how socioemotional selectivity and changes in emotion regulation skills may explain age-related changes in these phenomena. 

In this engaging discussion, Dr. Jason Storm, a philosopher and historian at Williams College, dives into the transition from postmodernism to metamodernism. He critiques simplified narratives around these philosophical movements while exploring their historical significance. The conversation spans topics like the evolutionary basis of language, the interplay between cognitive science and AI, and the fluidity of sex and gender. Storm's insights challenge conventional views and advocate for a broader understanding of cultural and psychological constructs.

Dr. Susana Monsó is a philosopher, animal ethicist, and author of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.  In this episode, we discuss how different animals grieve, how opossums fake death, why predators play with their prey, why dogs sometimes eat their deceased owners as a sign of love, and human rituals surrounding death. We discuss how this topic connects to interdisciplinary areas in philosophy, including animal sentience, the ethics of factory farmed food, moral utilitarianism and its pitfalls, the neuroscience of care and pain, and the moral responsibility that co-evolves with social intelligence. 

Dr. Karen Bales is a Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology at UC Davis, and an expert in oxytocin, pairbonding, and the neurobiology of care.  In this episode we discuss Karen’s background, education, and research on parental care and pairbonding across a wide variety of species including marosets, tamarins, titi monkeys, prairie voles, and seahorses. We discuss the shared evolutionary lineage between humans and other primates, similarities and differences between apes and monkeys, monkey mating and parenting behavior. We then discuss Karen’s experience working with Sue Carter studying oxytocin and the neurobiology of pairbonding in prairie voles, which led Karen to form her own lab at UC Davis studying the oxytocin system in other species. Lastly, we discuss a recent influential study examining the parental behavior of gene-edited prairie voles lacking an oxytocin receptor.

Dr. Alexey Tolchinsky, a licensed psychologist and adjunct professor at George Washington University, shares insights on chaos theory in psychology and neuroscience. He discusses how chaos can influence anxiety and personality traits, advocating for a nuanced understanding in clinical practice. The conversation dives into adolescent anxiety, emphasizing the importance of accurate diagnoses. They also explore the intricate balance of chaos and order, cultural influences on psychology, and the need for clearer communication in therapy.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. Dr. Christakis is an MD-PhD physician and sociologist known for applying social network analysis to the study of public health and the evolutionary psychology of cooperation. He is the author of several books including Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. In this episode Dr. Christakis and I discuss the methods of social network analysis, similarities and differences to game theory and population simulation research, and how cooperation and friendship co-evolved with social cognition. We discuss evolutionary explanations of modern day public health dilemmas including disease spread, obesity, loneliness, and internalizing disorders, as well as their development across the lifespan and cross-culturally. 

Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, Professor at the University of Cape Town, and author of The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness.  In this episode, we discuss The Hidden Spring - core areas within the brainstem which are the root of all feeling and consciousness in all vertebrates - and pioneering discoveries from affective, cognitive, and computational neuroscience that bridge together to build this theory. We discuss connections to philosophy of mind, active inference and predictive processing theories of consciousness, the (im)plausibility of panpsychism, whether memory is necessary for consciousness, the difference between metacognition and consciousness, how brain damage influences consciousness, feeling, and decision-making, whether invertebrates or even single cellular life can learn and possess consciousness, and where cognitive neuroscience has gone astray in being overly reductionist and dismissive of the complexity of animal subjective experience. We also talk about core differences between basic emotion theory, which states that we evolved with core brain systems dedicated to innate qualitatively distinct emotions, and constructed emotion theory, which argues that all emotions are cognitive contextual interpretations of affective valence and arousal. Finally, we discuss Dr. Solms’ early research on dreams, the connection between dreams, memory consolidation, imagination, and problem-solving, and the history and legacy of psychoanalysis in shaping modern neuropsychology.