Tom Chivers is a journalist who writes a lot about science and applied statistics. We talk about his new book on Bayesian statistics, the biography of Thomas Bayes, the history of probability theory, how Bayes can help with the replication crisis, how Tom became a journalist, 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: Tom's book about Bayes & Bayesian statistics relates to many of my previous episodes and much of my own research
0:03:12: A brief biography of Thomas Bayes (about whom very little is known)
0:11:00: The history of probability theory
0:36:23: Bayesian songs
0:43:17: Bayes & the replication crisis
0:57:27: How Tom got into science journalism
1:08:32: A book or paper more people should read
1:10:05: Something Tom wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:14:36: Advice for PhD students/postdocs/people in a transition period

Podcast links

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

Tom's links

• Website: https://geni.us/chivers-web
• Twitter: https://geni.us/chivers-twt
• Podcast: https://geni.us/chivers-pod

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 with Stuart Ritchie: https://geni.us/bjks-ritchie
Scott Alexander: https://www.astralcodexten.com/

Bayes (1731). Divine benevolence, or an attempt to prove that the principal end of the divine providence and government is the happiness of his creatures. Being an answer to a pamphlet entitled Divine Rectitude or an inquiry concerning the moral perfections of the deity with a refutation of the notions therein advanced concerning beauty and order, the reason of punishment and the necessity of a state of trial antecedent to perfect happiness.
Bayes (1763). An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London.
Bellhouse (2004). The Reverend Thomas Bayes, FRS: a biography to celebrate the tercentenary of his birth. Project Euclid.
Bem (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of personality and social psychology.
Chivers (2024). Everything is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World.
Chivers & Chivers (2021). How to read numbers: A guide to statistics in the news (and knowing when to trust them).
Chivers (2019). The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future.
Clarke [not Black, as Tom said] (2020). Piranesi.
Goldacre (2009). Bad science.
Goldacre (2014). Bad pharma: how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients.
Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science.

Laura Luebbert just finished her PhD in computational biology and will soon be a postdoc with Pardis Sabeti, to hunt some viruses. We talk about how she got into biology, how she created a widely-used software project (gget) with no prior coding experience, her recent reports when she discovered questionable data in key papers about honeybee dances, 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 Laura studied biology in Leiden/the Netherlands (and the importance of early scientific training)
0:13:41: How Laura ended up doing a PhD at Caltech with Lior Pachter (and how to choose one project if you're interested in many things)
0:22:00: gget: Developing and maintaining a software tool with no prior programming experience
0:54:07: Laura's future postdoc (with Pardis Sabeti): global virus-hunter
0:59:34: Finding and reporting questionable data in published papers about honeybee dances
1:36:43: A book or paper more people should read
1:38:55: Something Laura wishes she'd learnt sooner
1:40:38: Advice for PhD students/postdocs
1:44:02: Bonus: should I learn Catalan?

Podcast links

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

Laura's links

• Website: https://geni.us/luebbert-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/luebbert-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/luebbert-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 with Jessica Polka: https://geni.us/bjks-polka
Episode with Elisabeth Bik: https://geni.us/bjks-bik
Episode with Joe Hilgard: https://geni.us/bjks-hilgard

Prototype fund Germany: https://prototypefund.de/en/
PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/

Aaronovitch (2014-). Rivers of London series.
Frisch (1927). Aus dem Leben der Bienen.
Luebbert, Sullivan, Carilli, Hjörleifsson, Winnett, Chari & Pachter (2023). Efficient and accurate detection of viral sequences at single-cell resolution reveals putative novel viruses perturbing host gene expression. bioRxiv.
Luebbert & Pachter (2023). Efficient querying of genomic reference databases with gget. Bioinformatics.
Luebbert & Pachter (2024). The miscalibration of the honeybee odometer. arXiv.
https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2024/07/02/the-journal-of-scientific-integrity/

Laura Wesseldijk works at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt at the Behavioral Genetics unit in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam UMC. We talk about her research on the genetics of music and mental health, methods in behavioural genetics, the role of large samples, the importance of twins for behavioural genetics, 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: Did Beethoven have bad genetics for music - or are there problems with applying (some) genetic methods to individuals?
0:11:51: Different methods in behavioural genetics
0:24:20: Gene x environment interactions and the difficulty of disentangling them
0:30:30: 23andMe in genetics research
0:37:26: Can you ask an interesting question if you need millions of people to have done a measurement?
0:42:08: How to measure musicality (at scale)
0:47:56: Geneticists really love twins
0:50:41: Do critical periods in music exist?
1:03:30: How Laura got interested in the genetics of music
1:12:07: A book or paper more people should read
1:16:17: Something Laura wishes she'd learnt sooner
1:17:49: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

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

Laura's links

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

Ben's links

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

References
Begg, ... & Krause (2023). Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven. Current Biology.
Harden (2021). The genetic lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality.
Hjelmborg, ... & Kaprio, J. (2017). Lung cancer, genetic predisposition and smoking: the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer. Thorax.
Rutherford (2020). How to argue with a racist: History, science, race and reality.
Rutherford (2022). Control: the dark history and troubling present of eugenics.
Ullén, Mosing, Holm, Eriksson & Madison (2014). Psychometric properties and heritability of a new online test for musicality, the Swedish Musical Discrimination Test. Personality and Individual Differences.
Wesseldijk, Ullén & Mosing (2019). The effects of playing music on mental health outcomes. Scientific reports.
Wesseldijk, Mosing & Ullén (2021). Why is an early start of training related to musical skills in adulthood? A genetically informative study. Psychological Science.
Wesseldijk, Ullén & Mosing (2023). Music and genetics. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
Wesseldijk, Abdellaoui, Gordon, Ullén & Mosing (2022). Using a polygenic score in a family design to understand genetic influences on musicality. Scientific reports.
Wesseldijk, ... & Fisher (2024). Notes from Beethoven’s genome. Current Biology.

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.

David Van Essen is an Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. In this conversation, we talk about David's path to becoming a neuroscientist, the Human Connectome project, hierarhical processing in the cerebral cortex, 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: David's childhood: ravens, rockets, and radios
0:05:00: From physics to neuroscience (via chemistry)
0:13:55: Quantitative and qualitative approaches to science
0:19:17: Model species in neuroscience
0:31:35: Hierarchical processing in the cortex
0:46:54: The Human Connectome Project
0:55:00: A book or paper more people should read
0:58:01: Something David wishes he'd learnt sooner
1:00:31: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

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

David's links

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

David's autobiographical sketch for the Society for Neuroscience (in Volume 9): https://www.sfn.org/about/history-of-neuroscience/autobiographical-chapters

Felleman & Van Essen (1991). Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex.
Glasser, Coalson, Robinson, Hacker, Harwell, Yacoub, ... & Van Essen (2016). A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex. Nature.
Hubel & Wiesel (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. The Journal of physiology.
Maunsell & Van Essen (1983). The connections of the middle temporal visual area (MT) and their relationship to a cortical hierarchy in the macaque monkey. Journal of Neuroscience.
Sheldrake (2021). Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds & shape our futures.
Van Essen & Kelly (1973). Morphological identification of simple, complex and hypercomplex cells in the visual cortex of the cat. In Intracellular Staining in Neurobiology (pp. 189-198).
Van Essen & Maunsell (1980). Two‐dimensional maps of the cerebral cortex. Journal of Comparative Neurology.
Van Essen (2012). Cortical cartography and Caret software. Neuroimage.
Van Essen, Smith, Barch, Behrens, Yacoub, Ugurbil & WU-Minn HCP Consortium. (2013). The WU-Minn human connectome project: an overview. Neuroimage.
Wooldridge (1963). The machinery of the brain.

Nachum Ulanovsky is a professor at the Weizman Institute. We talk about his research on spatial navigation in bats, how Nachum started working with bats, the importance of natural behaviour, how to build a 700m long tunnel for neuroscience, and much more.

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

Timestamps
0:00:00: How Nachum started working with bats
0:09:29: The technical difficulties of working with bats and in a new species
0:16:03: The Egyptian Fruit Bat
0:19:42: Wild bats vs lab-born bats / spatial navigation in very large spaces
0:26:28: How to build a 700m long tunnel for neuroscience
0:44:30: 2 random questions about bats
0:53:48: The social lives of bats & social place cells
1:05:09: Why are there so many types of cells for spatial navigation?
1:13:01: Natural neuroscience
1:17:33: A book or paper more people should read
1:20:39: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links

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

Nachum's links

• Website: https://geni.us/ulanovsky-web

Ben's links

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

References & links
Bracken Cave in Texas, with millions of bats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNPioS_roRE
The Onion video on scientist who wasted life studying anteaters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXD9HnrNrvk

Eilam-Altstadter ... (2021). Stereotaxic brain atlas of the Egyptian fruit bat.
Eliav ... (2021). Multiscale representation of very large environments in the hippocampus of flying bats. Science.
Finkelstein ... (2015). Three-dimensional head-direction coding in the bat brain. Nature.
Geva-Sagiv ... (2015). Spatial cognition in bats and rats: from sensory acquisition to multiscale maps and navigation. Nat Rev Neuro.
Geva-Sagiv ... (2016). Hippocampal global remapping for different sensory modalities in flying bats. Nat Neuro.
Hafting ... (2005). Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature.
Hodgkin & Huxley (1952). A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve. The J phys.
Hubel & Wiesel (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex. The J phys.
Lettvin... (1959). What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain. Proceedings of IRE.
Miller (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two ... Psych Rev.
O'Keefe & Dostrovsky (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map ... Brain research.
Omer ... (2018). Social place-cells in the bat hippocampus. Science.
Sarel ... (2017). Vectorial representation of spatial goals in the hippocampus of bats. Science.
Sarel ... (2022). Natural switches in behaviour rapidly modulate hippocampal coding. Nature.
Tsoar ... (2011). Large-scale navigational map in a mammal. PNAS.
Ulanovsky ... (2003). Processing of low-probability sounds by cortical neurons. Nature neuroscience.
Ulanovsky & Moss (2007). Hippocampal cellular and network activity in freely moving echolocating bats. Nat Neuro.
Yartsev & Ulanovsky (2013). Representation of three-dimensional space in the hippocampus of flying bats. Science.