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Past Shows
June 20, 2009
 Download an MP3 of the entire program (22MB).
This is Your Brain on Dough
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In the midst of this global economic meltdown, one of the big questions on everyone's minds is, why are we so dumb about money? Answering this is the job of economists, of course, but it's only recently that economists have grasped how important some of the vagaries and foibles of human psychology are to how we make economic decisions. Dr. Richard Thaler, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the Booth School of Business in Chicago is one of the leading researchers in the relatively new field of behavioural economics. This is the field that's exploring some of the ways in which humans reliably and systematically make decisions that most economists would consider irrational. He's also written a best-selling book, called Nudge, Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness that explores ways to work around our irrational tendencies. Other behavioural economists, like Dr. Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioural Economics at the California Institute of Technology, are using advanced technologies, like MRI, to study just what's going on deep in the human brain when we make all sorts of decisions. Dr. Michael Platt, a Neurobiologist at Duke University and co-director of the Center for Neuroeconomics, also works on studying the way human and primate brains make decisions. He speculates that the reason for our often problematic decision making has to do with the fact that evolution shaped us to make decisions in a very different environment from the one in which we live today.
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Movin' on Up
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Dr. Quine's space elevator prototype, courtesy Thoth Technology Inc.
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If the second delay of the Space Shuttle Endeavor this week pointed out anything, it's how tricky it is to get a payload off the Earth and into orbit. It's costly, dangerous and uncertain. Which is exactly why Dr. Brendan Quine, Associate Professor of space engineering and planetary physics at York University, is so enthused by the idea of a space elevator. After all, how easy would space exploration be if you could simply step into an elevator car, push the button to the top floor and find yourself floating above the Earth? As simple as it sounds, it's an idea rife with technical problems. That said, Dr. Quine and his colleagues have recently developed a prototype they believe could be scaled up to a height of 20 km. Now, it wouldn't quite reach into space, but it does get the concept of a space elevator off the ground.
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Cambrian Killer
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Reconstruction of Hurdia victoria, illustration by Marianne Collins
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Allison Daley, a PhD student at Uppsala University in Sweden, who is working at the Royal Ontario Museum, was given a box of parts and asked to assemble them into an animal. She had no instructions, no picture of what she was looking for, but after three years of hard work, the creature she was able to assemble turns out to be one of the top predators of the earliest period of animal evolution. Hurdia victoria had a prow like a roman galley, articulated claspers and a round mouth with ferocious teeth.
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This is your Brain on Rose-Coloured Glasses
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Sure, being in a good mood changes the way you see the world, but it also looks like it changes the way the brain works. Dr. Adam Anderson, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, has been using functional MRI to look at how the mood we're in affects the way the brain works. Anderson had people look at a picture that either put them in a good mood or a bad mood, and then had them do a simple task that measured their attention. At the same time, he looked at their brain activation levels with the fMRI scans. It turns out that people in a positive mood took in more information about the world around them, while people in a negative mood took in less. Anderson says the brain is like a camera and the particular mood we're in is kind of like a lens that determines how much of the world we see. The idea is that the way we perceive the world -- and therefore think about it -- is heavily influenced by our emotional state.
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Theme music bed copyright Raphaël Gluckstein.
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