About
Wilf Nelson, BSc MSc
PhD Researcher, CHBH
Member of the British Psychological Society
Member of the Society for Neuroscience
I have now been running WaterCooler Neuroscience for two years and releasing episodes for just over a year at the time of writing this. The show has grown in amazing fashion and I am so happy I could move to podcasting where my talks are now heard by hundreds of thousands of people. But what is this show trying to do?
OK prepare for a mental journey because this new About Us was written when I realised that this show and food shows have a lot in common. This is going to be great. You will almost definitely have watched a traveling food show at some time. A well-spoken but eccentric presenter getting to travel to far off lands on a TV show’s dime and talking about a back-alley taco truck in Mexico or a steakhouse in Argentina no one knows about, maybe a noodle bar in Tokyo only accessible after eighty-five wrong turns. Those shows are amazing for me, they give me a window into a world that I would just never have known existed. Why am I talking about this? Well, that is what this show is for the brain.
Most of my guests are people you won’t have heard of; I am not only interviewing the neuroscientists already on TV but also those who do cutting-edge research found in the journals only scientists read. Just as I love to see some beautiful dish I know I’ll never get to try I want to bring you research you would have never known about, to inspire you, to teach you, and for the duration of my show open up the curtains just a little.
Are you ready to dive in and try something new?
My name is Jordana and I am a psychologist trained with a masters in depth psychology. I am also a professional coach and neurofeedback practitioner. In both of these pursuits, I work to help people reach their goals by using psychology and neuroscience to support them. I completely agree with Wilf’s idea that this platform is like a ‘food show’. We the hosts are so happy to talk about research papers, as you truly get a glimpse into a small pocket of the academic psychology world. Wilf and I have different opinions on how to approach the research and I love being able to talk about how this work, which is normally very sciency and inaccessible, can be used to help people day-to-day whether it be for pathologies or just to support others on their journey through life.
This is actually my own brain scan done when I first started my training as a neuroscientist.
2020
Saying something is ‘neuroscience’ is equivalent to calling it ‘rocket science’. It is both an endorsement and an insult at the same time. While everyone has a brain and we all spend our day thinking about what is going on in other’s heads, the actual workings of the brain and the mind are understandably impenetrable. With that being said, the brain is undeniably fascinating, it is the most complex object humanity has come across in the universe. The brain is what lets you read this sentence, it generates our understanding of the world and all the amazing things humans do to fill it.
So how do we get at the brain? That is where WCNeuro throws it hat in the ring. Through experimental psychology and neuroscience, our knowledge of the brain grows every day, but that knowledge is at conferences and in scientific journals however when it is distilled to the mass media a certain flavour of the work is lost. What if there was a podcast where we train you to understand scientists as scientists speak?
So how do we get at the brain? That is where WCNeuro throws it’s hat in the ring. Through experimental psychology and neuroscience, our knowledge of the brain grows every day, but that knowledge is at conferences and in scientific journals but when it is distilled to the mass media a certain flavour of the work is lost. What if there was a podcast where we train you to understand scientists as scientists speak?
Our series have different aims and are there to suit what you want to know about the brain:
WaterCooler Neuroscience: our flagship series where we invite peer-reviewed researchers in Psychology and Neuroscience. We go through their work and as they explain what they did to learn about the field you are brought up to speed as well. Each season also has two episodes where we discuss the methods that scientists take for granted but you only really learn about in university. How could you understand what a psychologist did if you have no idea how they did it?
A Brain Talking About Brains: when I was working on the first season of WCNeuro I realised my background as a psychologist gave me the privilege of knowing a great deal about the working of the brain, knowledge I took for granted. As I interviewed physicists, engineers, programmers, medical doctors and every other field that is part of neuroscience that privilege became more apparent. ABTAB works to address this, I discuss major findings in psychology that every psychologist knows by heart. I go through their history, what the original findings were and how decades of research and has tested and moulded those theories.
Think Fast: this is a new series we are designing for the potential brain researcher on the go. In this series, we discuss a research finding that had the greatest impression on our guest. In just fifteen minutes we break it down and how it shaped our guest’s thinking and their research. Easy as that.