This month’s podcast comes from Dr Lauren Hall-Lew, a lecturer in Sociolinguistics. With tourist season well and truly upon us it’s the perfect time to find out more about Lauren’s research into tourist attitudes to Scottish accents. Lauren and her team hit the streets of Edinburgh during a recent Edinburgh Festival Fringe to quiz tourists about their attitudes to Scottish accents in different contexts.
This month’s podcast is a fascinating interview with Dr Caroline Watt. It coincides with the recent launch of her book; Parapsychology: A beginners guide (2016). The book draws on Caroline’s years of experience as a senior lecturer in Psychology, and a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU), based here at the University of Edinburgh. Last year was the 30th Anniversary of the KPU and we were lucky enough to catch up with Caroline following her successful Fringe show, to talk to her about the history of the unit, her scientific research, and people’s attitudes to parapsychology and the paranormal.
This month’s podcast comes from Dr Aidan McGlynn, who discusses a paper he recently presented called ‘How pornography works: Pornography as undermining propaganda.’ Aidan is a lecturer in philosophy in the school of PPLS and has worked on a wide range of philosophical topics.
Have you ever suspected that people tend to see what they expect to see? If you have, then you might want to check out my new book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. The book explores an emerging view of the perceiving brain as a prediction machine. Brains like that are not cognitive couch-potatoes, passively awaiting the next waves of sensory stimulation. Instead, they are pro-active prediction engines constantly trying to guess at, or anticipate, the shape of the incoming sensory signal.
Dementia: it’s difficult to think of a more pressing topic. But what do we really know about dementia and about the ways to prevent it? In this podcast, Dr Tom Russ tell us that people living in the north of the UK and Sweden are 2 to 3 times more likely to develop dementia. Why is this the case? Dr Russ explains that we have some good candidates to explore in more detail.