Arne Ekstrom is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where he studies spatial navigation and memory. We talk about how he got into psychology, his unusual path to getting a PhD, his work on using single-cells recordings from people, the relationship between memory and spatial navigation, why he uses multiple methods, and much more.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: How Arne ended up studying psychology and neuroscience
0:06:23: Arne's route to a PhD recording single-cells in humans (via political activism in Central America)
0:20:18: The state of using VR-like tasks in the early 2000s
0:24:32: The status of spatial navigation research in the early 2000s
0:29:45: Collecting data from unusual populations
0:33:59: Why record from amygdala for a spatial navigation task?
0:41:35: Combining memory and navigation in hippocampus
1:02:04: Should I use one method or many?
1:11:29: A book or paper more people should read
1:13:51: Something Arne wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:14:51: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Arne's links

• Website: https://geni.us/ekstrom-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/ekstrom-scholar

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References & links

Episode with Lynn Nadel: https://geni.us/bjks-nadel
Episode with Nanthia Suthana: https://geni.us/bjks-suthana
Episode with Nikolai Axmacher: https://geni.us/bjks-axmacher
Episode with Nachum Ulanovsky: https://geni.us/bjks-ulanovsky

Argyropoulos ... & Butler (2019). Network-wide abnormalities explain memory variability in hippocampal amnesia. Elife.
Ekstrom, .. & Fried (2003). Cellular networks underlying human spatial navigation. Nature.
Ekstrom ... & Kahana (2005). Human hippocampal theta activity during virtual navigation. Hippocampus.
Ekstrom ... & Bookheimer (2009). Correlation between BOLD fMRI and theta-band local field potentials in the human hippocampal area. J neurophys.
Ekstrom ... & Starrett (2017). Interacting networks of brain regions underlie human spatial navigation: a review and novel synthesis of the literature. J neurophys.
Ekstrom & Ranganath (2018). Space, time, and episodic memory: The hippocampus is all over the cognitive map. Hippocampus.
Hassabis ... & Maguire (2009). Decoding neuronal ensembles in the human hippocampus. Current Biology.
Iaria & Burles (2016). Developmental topographical disorientation. TiCS.
Kunz ... & Axmacher (2015). Reduced grid-cell–like representations in adults at genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Science.
Logothetis ... & Oeltermann (2001). Neurophysiological investigation of the basis of the fMRI signal. Nature.
Watrous ... & Ekstrom (2013). Frequency-specific network connectivity increases underlie accurate spatiotemporal memory retrieval. Nat Neuro.
Zhang & Ekstrom (2013). Human neural systems underlying rigid and flexible forms of allocentric spatial representation. Human brain mapping.

Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of the recent biography of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (The brain in search of itself), and The Dreams of Santiago Ramon y Cajal. We talk about Cajal's life and work, Cajal's unlikely beginnings in a rural Spain, how he discovered that neurons were separate from each other, leading to the neutron doctrine, how Cajal became famous seemingly overnight, Cajal's rivalry with Camillo Golgi, the relationship between art and science, how to write a biography of someone whose autobiographical writings were heavily influenced by picaresque novels, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: Why Cajal is worth talking about
0:01:42: Cajal's father
0:04:48: Cajal's childhood
0:17:22: Cajal's early work on the brain, and the status of neuroscience in the 1880s
0:23:45: The conference that made Cajal famous
0:29:42: Cajal's years as a famous scientist
0:35:33: Cajal's personality
0:41:14: Cajal & Golgi's rivalry
0:45:48: del Rio and the discovery of glia cells
0:49:13: Picaresque novels and the difficulty of trusting Cajal's stories of himself
1:02:52: A book or paper more people should read
1:04:14: Something Ben wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:04:57: Advice for PhD students/postdocs - people in a transitory period

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Ben (Ehrlich)'s links

• Website: http://www.benehrlich.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/benehrlich11

Ben (Kuper-Smith)'s links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References & links

Kölliker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_von_K%C3%B6lliker
Golgi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camillo_Golgi
del Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ADo_del_R%C3%ADo_Hortega

Calvino (1972). Invisible cities.
Ehrlich (2017). The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
Ehrlich (2022). The brain in search of itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the story of the neuron.
Pitlor & Lee (editors). The Best American Short Stories 2023 .

Emily Finn is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. We talk about her research on neural fingerprinting, naturalistic stimuli, how Emily got into science, the year she spent in Peru before her PhD, advice for writing well, and much more.

There are occasional (minor) audio disturbances when Emily's speaking. Sorry about that, still trying to figure out where they came from so that it won't happen again.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps
0:00:00: Supportive peer review
0:03:25: Why study linguistics?
0:11:05: Uncertainties about doing a PhD/taking time off
0:18:05: Emily's year-and-a-half in Peru
0:25:17: Emily's PhD
0:29:34: Neural fingerprints
0:49:25: Naturalistic stimuli in neuroimaging
1:24:01: How to write good scientific articles
1:30:55: A book or paper more people should read
1:34:58: Something Emily wishes she'd learnt sooner
1:39:20: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Emily's links

• Website: https://geni.us/finn-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/finn-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/finn-twt

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References and links

Episode w/ Nachum Ulanovsky: https://geni.us/bjks-ulanovsky

Byrge & Kennedy (2019). High-accuracy individual identification using a “thin slice” of the functional connectome. Network Neuroscience.
Burkeman (2021). Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals.
Finn, ... & Constable (2014). Disruption of functional networks in dyslexia: a whole-brain, data-driven analysis of connectivity. Biological psychiatry.
Finn, Shen, ... & Constable (2015). Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity. Nature Neuroscience.
Finn, ... & Constable (2018). Trait paranoia shapes inter-subject synchrony in brain activity during an ambiguous social narrative. Nature Communications.
Finn, ... & Bandettini (2020). Idiosynchrony: From shared responses to individual differences during naturalistic neuroimaging. NeuroImage.
Finn & Bandettini (2021). Movie-watching outperforms rest for functional connectivity-based prediction of behavior. NeuroImage.
Finn (2021). Is it time to put rest to rest?. Trends in cognitive sciences.
Finn & Rosenberg (2021). Beyond fingerprinting: Choosing predictive connectomes over reliable connectomes. NeuroImage.
Grall & Finn (2022). Leveraging the power of media to drive cognition: A media-informed approach to naturalistic neuroscience. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Hasson, ... & Malach (2004). Intersubject synchronization of cortical activity during natural vision. Science.
Hedge, Powell & Sumner (2018). The reliability paradox: Why robust cognitive tasks do not produce reliable individual differences. Behavior research methods.
Sava-Segal, ... & Finn (2023). Individual differences in neural event segmentation of continuous experiences. Cerebral Cortex.